Patrice Gros

As I boarded my flight for France, I found myself, at last, in a reflective mood. Much around us is shifting, yet our speedy lifestyle often conceals those changes from plain view. It takes a trip far away to realize how the landscape is evolving.

With energy prices and closely related food prices shooting up, deep-set social patterns are showing wear. Multiplying weather catastrophes and disappearing biotopes around the globe are raising questions about our performance as the species most responsible for Earth's future. As a result, many across the nation are finally drawing a line and are in the process of recasting their life choices.

I recently helped a neighbor through our local timebank with his greenhouse. His next move is to start producing basic fresh food for his family year-round. GM is on the brink of bankruptcy with Hummers and SUVs sitting on lots like dinosaurs stuck in a tar-pit. Coca Cola is buying family-run companies like Honest Tea and hoping to keep them that way: family-run and honest. I got a call from a Wal-Mart produce buyer hoping to carry local produce in our area's stores. And yes, a black man might become our next president. Social and economical tremors are shaking and tugging.

The people rule

Earth is sick. The players in this ultimate drama are people as demanders, corporations and other producers as suppliers, and our government as regulator. People shape society through their chosen behaviors.

Take food for instance: Americans have accepted cheap, conveniently packaged/prepared/distributed food for their chosen standard. Agricultural businesses and food processors have responded and supplied those food items cheaply and efficiently. That they also inflicted massive damage to our ecology and nation's health in the process was lost in the race for bigger profits and market share. So we became obese and diabetic, and our fish died and our forests vanished. Think about it as a child who found a quart of ice cream and ate it all. He did not die but he got really sick and now he knows better.

Indeed, there are some signs that we are getting wiser. There is a new generation of architects who are designing buildings which can function on little outside energy. There is a new generation of lawyers who are committing to defend Earth's rights. There is a new generation of farmers who deeply care about their land, their soil and their customers. All are preparing to cater to our newly emerging life choices.

The 'American' way

The energy crisis is about our life choices. Europeans are way ahead of us with smaller energy footprints for cars and homes. They even have smaller trash cans.

We do not need 135 additional nuclear plants by 2018 as our Department of Energy calculates. We need to stop being energy hogs. Even corporations can shift their paradigms through the people who manage and own them.

"Triple bottom-line" companies are emerging which combine profitability with ecology and social justice. High growth and volume goals can be replaced by measurements of product or service quality, ecological performance, customer satisfaction or even employees' happiness. Those new paradigms come with supporting, sustainable new technologies.

It's your choice

But again and again it all starts with us, consumers (or non-consumers), as choice-makers. When we all want a Prius for our next car, hybrid technology becomes the norm. When we all choose a tomato whose quality and provenance is established through a local connection between a farmer and a customer, that tomato becomes the norm. And when we choose to spend our free time "in place," visiting with neighbors, playing in the yard with our kids, walking through the woods or reading a book, the effects on our society are profound.

Please review your life and buying habits in light of today's crisis and with our children's future in mind. Some recent surveys show that most people do not really care about what happens after they die. If that is indeed the case, the world, as we know it, will crumble and self-destruct. Earth in the balance; the next 50 years will tell.