25 March. 2021
Without getting too deeply about the reasons why I live in the Republic of Belarus and have been here for almost 20 years, suffice it to say we are no longer the most eco-friendly country in the world. In fact, the last 7 years have proved the willingness of the state to allow Russia and the Russian oil Business to dictate policy much to the detriment of public cleanliness. The oil business is a dirty business and everything it touches diminishes in value.
The obviousness of the reason for this is dollars and greed and money and there would be no one who argues this. And along with this unfortunately, nobody would argue that this is a hyper-conservative country with a hyper conservative not particularly Democratic regime and that there is an extreme limitation on possibilities for freedom of speech. One cannot simply speak and be heard here. One does not actually have such rights. Well, I seem to but this is a day-to-day affair.
So what is missing here is the human element of actual vested interest in the place. Without a voice that matters, we do not matter and that feeling gets all over everything here. We are only components in some other person’s game and we are completely at the mercy of their decisions.
But with global warming being the topic of the day pretty much every day as far as I’m concerned, we have to address problems spots such as the Republic of Belarus and other Eastern European countries also under the thumb of Russia. It is extremely impactful to have this much concentration on acquisition of wealth and not on the living habitat of the people who live here. Stressing and economic system that cannot be beat and that no one can rise above demands participation in the oil business. If you do not have a car and do not spend money to move around for business, you have no business and get dropped like a piece of garbage on the side of an already dirty road. It’s a dirty road and it’s a dirty business but it has been fully embraced by the state for money. Just for the Love of money and not for the love of its people.
However, there was a time here when basic cleanliness was at the forefront of understanding of what made for a good community. I’m talking during the time of the Soviet Union when communal living was a part of community understanding. I’m not going to argue every plus and minus of this, I’m only saying that people practiced being good community members and anything you practice everyday gets better because of your practice. And they were very, very good at being very good people. They did not make much garbage, they did not use many resources, they did not create any ecological damage by too much car usage – well, the large scale industrial projects run by the state were pretty awful and that’s without even starting in about Chernobyl. But everybody understood that overuse of resources was very bad because it created unnecessary garbage which put a strain on the surrounding area.
But one other thing that they did do that was very good was participate in food security. The way they accomplished this was by making available little wooden cottages out in the countryside where people could maintain something a little bit less than an acre. People would usually have their kitchen gardens here and keep a horse or a cow and some pigs. I’m a vegan and my thought of what to do with farm animals is very much on my mind these days but basically said, feeding the land with horseshit, cow shit, pig shit or chicken shit every year probably did quite a bit for fertility. And there was no particular chemical fertilizers that were overused. Again, I don’t want to get into all of the pluses and minuses and though they might have been trying, it wasn’t Utopia. But to participate in your own food security went a long way towards diminishing the need for products to travel long distances to get to anybody stable.
It was basically organic, everything was local and everybody knew where their food came from. Generally, the most excellent kind of community possible.
But communism officially ended and it was replaced by sort of a pseudo socialist situation where the state just basically dominates all business and opportunities to grow for the individual is simply suppressed. It has been changing slowly towards privatization but of course, the state loves giving large size businesses all of the brakes and allows them to use Belarus as a prophet sink. Goods and services from long distances away get purchased and the money for these purchases leaves the area and only the garbage of what is bought is left.
Basically changing from the best people possible to the worst in a matter of a few years. And All for the love of money.
I suppose the point of what I’m saying is that echo activism must grow in Republic of Belarus. We do have some signs of life and I am not the only ecologist here. But what is necessary is for people’s voices to grow and be heard. Nobody’s talking about throwing themselves into the barricades or to submit to police punishment. We’ve already seen this nonsense in that false revolution we had last year. No one’s talking about Russian sponsored public demonstrations about anything.
But if there is to be a future and if there will be future generations of people, we must speak about this and we must do everything we can to return to the land, return to local participation and community and return to the community values that absolutely existed here. The United States might have echoed the Russian sentiment about making the country great again. But what all of these arguments miss is that what was great previously is that the world was sustainable. Society was sustainable and reliant on human effort and human decency. you might have the idea stuck in your head that communism is bad or evil because somebody told you that but what it basically means is that the people who lived as communists were simply very, very conscientious and polite people. They just lived without causing harm better than almost anybody.
And in this way, Belarusians were exactly known as the best people. That was one of the first things I learned when I came here. Belarusians were the best people. Perhaps it meant that they were the most masochistic, as it seems is true these days. But I think it meant that they had the biggest hearts and were the best at being polite to each other and to the world. And if you wish to wonder why I have been here for 20 years, it is because I met them. I met those people. And those people had what I was looking for: a good community to live in.
Don’t be silent. Green is the only color revolution the world needs. It means that we return to nature, we move away from the oil business and the plastic business and national chain food and goods and work locally, sustainably and politely to each other and to the planet that feeds us. This is worth fighting for. And it’s not a national thing and it’s not about war, it’s about making peace with the world and with each other for the sake of the continuation of the planet and all life on it.
