“Young people need reassurance that the adults in their world are doing everything we can to solve their problems” – Julie Johnston.

Share Vega’s message about animal agriculture and climate change.

Share Vega’s message about Food Healers.

Dear Fellow Elders,

I am about half way through the seventh decade of my existence on planet Earth and feel compelled to write to you as we witness the divisive horror show that has become our daily news feed. We can change all this for the better if we deploy the vast resources we command as a generation to actually solve our global problems with integrity.

For the readers of this newsletter, it is now well established that if we all “Go Vegan and Reforest the Planet,” that would go a long way towards solving all of our global environmental problems, while greatly facilitating the meeting of all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), except perhaps the Trojan horse SDG #8 (Economic Growth).

“Go Vegan and Reforest the Planet” is a simple solution that anyone can wrap their head around and it would mitigate all six planetary boundary transgressions identified by the Stockholm Resilience Institute in 2023 – biosphere integrity, novel entities, biogeochemical flows, climate change, land system change and fresh water change – while laying the foundation for a robust solution to all three major global environmental problems identified at the UN “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992 – biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change.

When we work on such a holistic solution, that would unite us all towards a common purpose – to restore the integrity of the life support systems on our beautiful planet. We human beings are at our best when we collaborate on such a common purpose that is larger than ourselves.

However, the mainstream is still acting as if the only thing that our generation knows how to do is to make more money. In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Radio 4 program on Shared Planet: Religion and Nature in 2013, Dr. James Gustave Speth, a doyen of the modern American environmental movement, a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and a former Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, made a revealing statement. He said,

“I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems.

I was wrong.

The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these, we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

A decade later, we have reached a truly critical point in this much needed spiritual and cultural transformation. If we let the mainstream “selfishness, greed and apathy” continue unchecked, we would surely be held responsible for committing the greatest crime against humanity that any generation of human beings has ever committed – the irreversible destruction of the life support systems on our beautiful planet.

“Go Vegan and Reforest the Planet” is the “Lifestyle Medicine for the Planet” solution for our planetary scale ailments. It is still being deliberately ignored in the “Cow in the Room” mainstream discourse, which is centered around profit-making technological “solutions” such as Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) that might, at best, mitigate one symptom of our planetary ailments – the fever that is global warming – while doing nothing about the root cause.

Speaking of global warming, as a systems engineer who has been studying the nonlinear feedback loops in the Earth’s climate system, I find the recent acceleration in global warming that has seen global temperature records being broken every month since June 2023 deeply alarming.

June 2023 was the hottest June ever,
July 2023 was the hottest July ever,
August 2023 was the hottest August ever,
September 2023 was the hottest September ever,
October 2023 was the hottest October ever,
November 2023 was the hottest November ever,
December 2023 was the hottest December ever,
January 2024 was the hottest January ever,
February 2024 was the hottest February ever,
March 2024 was the hottest March ever,
April 2024 was the hottest April ever
and May 2024 is shaping to become the hottest May ever in the temperature record.

Even as these hotter than ever temperatures get recorded on our planet Earth month after month after month, the response of the global political class resembles that of children squabbling over broken toys as their home burns around them.

The global industrial civilization that the political class is administering on behalf of what Carroll Quigley called the “Anglo-American Establishment” is literally crumbling in front of our eyes and it is clear that these “children squabbling over broken toys” are not going to suddenly become responsible fire-fighting adults overnight. Therefore, it is time that we, the elders of the planet, quickly go about implementing the only solution that has a chance to save our children and grandchildren: “Go Vegan and Reforest the Planet”.

The Russian novelist, Anton Chekhov wrote,
“In Nature, a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings, it is the other way around: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.”

But, to state the obvious, we, human beings, are also an integral part of Nature and the separation between humans and Nature implied in Chekhov’s short story is simply a delusion. Indeed, we are now collectively transforming from a “repulsive caterpillar species” into a “lovely butterfly species” and by doing so, we are literally finding our Fountain of Youth as we return home to whom we really are – our true childhood selves filled with awe and wonder on the pristine majesty of our restored, beautiful planet Earth.

With much love,

Sailesh on behalf of the Climate Healers Core team.
(Alison, Anne, BJ, Carl, Dakota, Dani, Deborah, Debra, Gabriele, Giva, Jamen, Kelly, Ken, Kimaya, Krish, Lisa, Liz, Maggie, Marco, Paige, Pareen, Paul, Ray, Sailesh, Sarah, Shankar, Stacey, Suzanne, Tami and Vega, the Cow and Climate Healer and her Veguitas)