What price luxury?

"What price would we pay ... what irreplaceable treasure would we forfeit for profit or greater comfort during our short stay on this earth?"

What price would we pay for greater comfort during our life-time? I would imagine that most people would be willing to pay a great deal since people in the United States spent 179 billion dollars on luxury items in 2017.  Investopedia  defines a luxury item as "an item that is not necessary for living, but is deemed as highly desired …." At an annual cost of $2,641/person for food , the amount of money Americans alone spend on luxury items could feed 67,777,357 people for a year. That's the entire population of Thailand.

As shocking and interesting as this is, the second half of the question gets to the real guts of the issue; viz. what irreplaceable treasure would we forfeit? The answer to the first question - what price would we pay? – seems evident from the dollars we spend. The answer to the second question – what treasures would we forfeit? – is answered by our behavior.

Based on the world population, 60,800,000,000 trees are needed each day to provide enough oxygen  (population x8) for the Earth's human population. This doesn't count any other life form requiring oxygen.  Humans have a strong tendency to forgot that there are other living things on the earth. I didn't include there numbers here because they are not readily available since humans don't seem to think they matter.  We currently cut down 41,095,890 trees a day, much of it just clearing land for "progress".   What price would we pay?  What treasure are we willing to forfeit?

EcoWatch  reports that there are garbage patches, consisting mostly of plastic and some the size of the State of Texas, floating in our oceans. The Los Angeles area dumps ten metric tons of plastic fragments into the ocean each day. Water is more than a treasure, it is life! Yet we seem willing to forfeit clean water for comfort and convenience. We do the same thing with our air, our consumption of minerals, and our destruction of the land, just for starters.

The thing is . . . I'm not telling you anything you haven't heard many times. This really is common knowledge.  We are killing our oceans. We are destroying our forests. We are sterilizing our soil. We are making our air unbreathable. And that's just the top four!  For what?  Comfort, convenience and luxury.

It is like telling a smoker that they are killing themselves and everyone around them. They know it is true, but what does it take to make them stop?  I had a patient, who was dying of lung cancer, insist that we take him outside to smoke just hours before he died.  We know we are killing our world and ourselves by our excessive consumption of unnecessary products. What price are we willing to pay for our luxury? The price we will pay will be our future and that of our children.  There are obviously plenty of people who have the attitude that, since they're not going to be alive to reap the benefits of any austerity, why should they bother to participate in any attempt to fix the problem.  Perhaps they don't have family.  Who would knowingly cause their children, grandchildren and all future generations to suffer when there is something we can do?  

  

Nature, clean water and air, pure soil are the irreplaceable treasure we are forfeiting?  Sadly, it is going to be our children and grandchildren who are going to pay the ultimate price and face a gruesome reality.  What price is too much?  What treasure is too precious?  Or does everything go?