1. No Poverty
a) Write to the government and insist that
the banks and NAMA are brought to account.
Demonstrate in solidarity with those already homeless.
b) Write to the Department of Social
Services and ask for fairer benefits for those once self employed, now living
in poverty.
c) Offer work to those you know who are
broke in exchange for meals, education, accommodation.
2. Zero Hunger
a) Refine your food purchases and waste
nothing – in France it is now illegal for supermarkets to throw away food, they
must pass it on to those in need. We are the micro version of that macro
solution too.
b) Give up the cheap choices with the
realization that someone somewhere is being exploited at full cost – be it
their fresh water, contamination by chemicals or labour.
c) Buy local and Seasonal food but sponsor
a person or project in a developing country to do the same.
3. Good Health and Wellbeing
a) Drink plenty of water to support every
function of your body – refuse fluoridation, pesticide and other agriculture
contamination and fracking of fresh water resources.
b) Love each other and your pets
c) Ease your conscience - by dispelling, on
a daily basis, any illusions, beliefs and unhelpful stories you find that
you’ve been telling yourself and being kind to others.
4. Quality Education
a) Whether it’s for your children or
oneself, make education a creative, empowering exercise.
b) Challenge people to care, consider,
articulate, communicate and innovate…not compete.
c) Life skills, values and objectivity are
a foundation to be taught alongside all technical subjects. This is the deal in
Belgium already, every term students must do a module of philosophy…so no
subject becomes removed from reality.
5. Gender Equality
a) Women should get the same wages for
doing the same work. Kind of obvious but not yet implemented in any country.
b) Men are going to have to stop dominating
women – the role is to shift from using to protecting. In fact, both genders
need to realize that all life in all its forms needs protecting rather than using.
c) Empowerment of women will consist in
their increasing their inner authority and independence. They must practice
self-referencing and immunity to what others think of them.
6. Clean Water and Sanitation
a) Appreciate fresh water availability, to
a new level. Take one look on Google Images of Drought - the massively cracked
and cratered landscape that much of the world has become. People walking for
miles to find water, dirty water. Picture making that decision whether to drink
it yourself, or pour it on to a seedling that might or might not grow into some
nourishment.
b) Don’t eat meat or dairy. 15,000 litres
of fresh water to produce 1kg of meat but only 200 litres to grow 1kg
vegetables. Dairy is incredibly heavy on water too. Plus the contamination of
land and sea from untreated waste. Off it goes into the waterways, the muck of
thousands of poor confined pigs and cows.
c) Stop spraying weed killers etc in your
garden and flushing bleach into your septic tank as it all ends up in the water
course, killing the wildlife. Contraceptive hormones are so prevalent in
people’s wee that they’re present in drinking water too, as are fluoride,
chlorine, Round Up etc etc.
7. Affordable and Clean Energy
Staying with the ESB grid as is, is
basically a perpetuation of the oblivious use of fossil fuels.
a) Help the inordinate amount of elderly
people sitting around in cold rooms by insisting on affordable and clean
energy, while you’re fit enough to make a stand.
b) Support the ‘Shell To Sea’ movement that
opposes the complete sale of Irish gas resources with no savings to customers,
no tax contribution to support other services and infrastructure and no carbon
tax, no responsibility to protect the public water source and their free use of
millions of litres of fresh water for the fracking and gas cleaning processes,
while the lowest income people having their water charges taken from source
(that source being their benefits!)
c) Clean energy would include tidal turbines
and solar panels and many other new technologies for producing energy. If
you’re building a house from scratch or can wangle a contribution from
Sustainable Authority Ireland, put on solar voltaic panels. Also turn out
lights and pilot lights and explore insulation and stoves – increase your level
of independence from the grid. If you’re a little bit handy, attend one of the
many build your own generator courses being run.
Try and make our whole use of energy more
conscious.
8. Decent Work and Economic Growth
a) If you can’t find ‘decent work’, start
your own project. Indecent work includes abbatoirs, pharmaceutical companies,
food production facilities, hotels, computer companies. The reason these are
not decent is that it takes oceans of chemicals and animals and ignorance to
scale up these things. If you work there, you have no say in the process.
Pharmaceutical companies also have dubious agendas. We know from the level of
toxicity of chemotherapies (The cancer might not kill you but the chemotherapy
definitely will) and the amount of animal experiments justified and the fact
that these companies have Mission Statements that read something like ‘we
intend to have every citizen on an average of 4 prescribed drugs from the
cradle to the grave’. Try not to be a part of industries you don’t agree with
or that are damaging.
b) Instead of economic growth, let’s have
food security and a circular economy. c) We can all grow something or provide a
service and enrich the quality of life for entire communities with immediate
effect. This doesn’t require legislation. Just do it. A further plus is that
when activities and produce are exchanged rather than money, people aren’t
fleeced by the tax man. (Quite a good analogy, fleecing, when you picture an
innocent sheep held to the ground and
their wool sheered off, usually nicking the skin as well)
9. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
a) This is where we each get to use our
imaginations…teaching, making, recycling, restoring, sharing, re-visioning,
growing, perfecting, enjoying once again and valuing.
b) If
we don’t want food saturated in pesticides and herbicides, we need to teach
organic growing systems, as is done through the Community Garden Networks. This
is also a model for groups to collectively design, develop and manage gardens.
We can’t expect farmers to handle acres of crops without chemicals and without
manpower either. Offer your help, even better as a family. Feed your animals
organic food so that their muck can provide rich natural fertilizer to the
soil.
c) We know that infrastructure now just
means ‘jobs for the boys’. The enterprise board just pay money to their
‘mentors’ and no actual projects; the council’s just give massive public
contracts and amounts of money to private companies to deal with their problems
for them – like respite homes and stray animals and all the social services
that need expertise and experience. So we must start our own enterprises, with
integrity and low overheads and build them with no help…but yet no hindrance
either…from the current structures.
10. Reduced Inequalities
Inequalities include differences in income
and accommodation and access to education and care. We tend to think that the
richest people and companies should be made to share their disproportionate
winnings. However, this is a short neural pathway to feeling even less equal…as
we can’t force the hand of the government to tax appropriately or inspire any
of the rich people to share their money.
Instead, we should
a) Develop solidarity with everyone we
meet.
b) Refuse the notion of inequality by
flagging it up whenever we see it.
c) Never succumb to feeling less than
anyone else.
11. Sustainable Cities and Communities
a) Use hydroponics, as they do in O’Hare
Airport and other massively built up areas, to grow crops vertically and in
protected environments.
Involve staff in food production. The same
in your own window boxes and gardens first. Get some oxygen-producing foliage
on the go and herbs and vegetables.
b) There is a real opportunity for borrowed
heat from neighbouring apartments in town and city centres, so one can mind
one’s own electricity use.
c) Get to know your neighbours. The least
sustainable thing about city life is the fear everyone has of everyone else.
Find a way to feel safe and that you are a welcome part of a community. Then no
one will want to beat you up and or nick all your stuff when you’re out and
about.
12. Responsible Consumption and Production
a) How much do we eat? Is it what we want
or what we need and why.
b) Avoiding mass produced food with
chemicals.
c) They say consumers are the most powerful
activists. Do an inventory of your cupboards and consider preservatives,
e-numbers, animal products, animal testing and the supply chain – eg palm oil,
killing orangutan habitat, people working for no wages to extract it and its
insertion into a multitude of foods unnecessarily. Therefore, withdraw your
financial support, don’t buy the things.
13. Climate Action
a) Don’t waste water
b) Stop animal agriculture
c) Don’t throw away anything that can be
composted.
d) Don’t make anything that is not
biodegradable
14. Life Below Water
a) Campaign to make Irish Waters a no-take
zone, get the super trawlers banned from everywhere, if possible and to stop
the seismic blasting disorientating an disturbing all remaining sea life.
b) Individually, don’t eat fish
c) Don’t litter and think about packaging
in general. There are miles of plastic waste in the sea that we can stop adding
to.
d) Donate some time or money to help clear it
up.
15. Life on Land
a) Join a Community Garden or food scheme
b) Collaborate with your neighbours; car
pool, share internet and bins use, mend things for each other and keep each
other company.
c) Buy locally grown food so farmers don’t
go bankrupt competing with imports.
16. Peace, Justice & Strong Institutions
Contradiction in terms?
a) Cultivate peace inside and hold a vision
of justice
b)But don’t go looking for it, as the
systems are corrupt and you will be rendered further demoralized.
c) Funding alone decides legal, business,
government and council matters so that is why we need to build new structures
and partnerships, on more qualitative and sustainable grounds.
17. Partnerships for the goals
Food, energy, care, technical support,
maintenance, innovation, education. Whatever you need, go find the person who
knows about it and see if, by great chance, you have something they need too.
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