Any caring, loving, and protective mother wants best for her child and nurtures them in the best way she knows and can. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, this means to feed the baby breastmilk.
However, there comes a time when the child needs to be weaned off the breastmilk and change to solids for optimal growth & development. This is an important transition in any child’s life and one of the most transformative ones too.
The whole breastfeeding issue and time of weaning can be fertile ground for all sorts of debate, fear-mongering, bullying, and moral crusading by semi-militant and arrogant think-they-know-it-all’s.
Nevertheless, babies fed on formula can thrive and grow up to be fairly normal people and no human can survive on their mother’s breastmilk alone; they would be underdeveloped and die, I reckon.
Now, before you get stuck into me about the above, it is all kinda metaphorically speaking.
For example, the ‘mother’ is the Oil & Gas Industry; the ‘breastmilk’ is the extracted fossil products; the ‘baby’ can be many things, e.g. the regional (e.g. Taranaki) economy, the national economy and GDP, the consumers of all products derived from petroleum products or my preferred one: mankind.
For its survival and growth & development (i.e. to reach its potential), mankind needs to be weaned off fossil fuels. That much is obvious.
This is where the ‘know-it-all’s’ come in. They scream child-murder; they claim the mother will die too; and the worst part, they say, perhaps surprisingly, is the spilling of the liquid gold down the drain.
As usual, they over-egg things to a beat-up frenzy of froth and hot air; it ain’t pretty and is not intended for human consumption as such.
But mankind needs to change its ways of burning fossil fuels, wasteful consumption of energy resources, raping & pillaging of the environment to feed its insatiable lust for consumption of mostly non-vital stuff, and the whole profit-driven economy. All these are human constructs and choices, not inevitable natural events or unavoidable Natural Laws. They interact in a self-reinforcing feedback loop of stunted growth & development (the chronic illness of modern man) that ultimately leads to self-destruction and a painful torturous death. Who would want to wish that upon one’s offspring? Nobody sane, yet this is what is what’s happening; this is what we do …
Transition won’t be easy, painful even, but it is absolutely unavoidable and necessary for transformative growth & development. Nobody wants to stay small forever (with the exception of Oskar Matzerath). So, we have a choice.
Mothers know best. This is where the metaphor stops being useful 😉
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