Closed. The boat sank, the sharks won.

My son started this. He came to me after watching a kids news programme (Newsround I think - I was cooking lunch) "Mummy." He said. "I’m glad we didn’t have a bonfire. They’re bad." So I chatted to him as I cooked (boiled eggs and toastie soldiers in case anyone is interested.)

There had been a piece about bonfire and firework smoke overburdening the atmosphere and there being an annual rise in acute asthma attacks.  He’s concerned about his Granny as she has a nasty cough (Emphysema actually but he knows it as a nasty cough). I told him she probably stayed home and she’d be fine. So we ate our eggs, free range, organic and very very local - the best! And we chatted about the world we live in.

It’s been a while since I went for a ramble through a news site for eco stuff.  Horizon (BBC2 9pm) tells of a hypothetical humanised bird flu pandemic that will wipe out most of the human population because we’re just not prepared. They paint a very scary picture.

The world’s once busy cities will lie eerily silent. A quarter of the workforce will be absent. Public transport will all but disappear, schools will close and public gatherings will be banned.

This vision is not science fiction. It is based on the latest scientific research, which forms the basis for government policy across the globe. Contingency plans for pandemic flu predict millions of deaths, economic meltdown and society in chaos.

 It’s a common science fiction theme but is it really that dramatised? I tend towards the deeper ecology view that the earth will survive and if there is a greater sentience at work it will target those responsible for the damage.

So, why is the human species trying to combine Mice and Humans? Or Cows and Humans?

From the mice and men one….

The mixing up and merging of species is not new to science: a multitude of creatures straddling the line between animal and human already exist in laboratories around the world.

Great. And what happens when one escapes. What if Horizon is right and the flu pandemic is imminent? This stuff scares the pants off me. The human/cow one is allegedly for stem cell research. Why? There are other sources of stem cells available, they just need co-ordinated harvesting. Every child born has a placenta and umbilicus rich with stem cells. Mostly they are destroyed. Every menstruating woman sheds stem cells every cycle. Why are these not routinely collected and used?

So we have illnesses now resistant to our wonderful antibiotics. We have a planet slowly dying under our demands.  There’ll be no fish in the seas within 50 years if we’re not very very careful. The speed at which we are destroying our world is accelerating.

So what can we do?

Here’s a start. There is so much that can be done, even on a very tight budget. What could you do today? What difference can you make? Because if each of us does nothing then the destruction will only continue, the rape and mutilation of the world we live in will escalate. There is damage done now that is already irreversible and it’s getting worse.