Diet for a bloated planet

I have been on a diet since January 7th. (Actually, I prefer to call it a "healthy eating plan" - just in case I don't keep the weight off.) It involves the usual bans on sugar, simple carbs and alcohol, limits on the portion sizes of lean meat and fish, and as many green veggies as I can consume. It feels good. It's simple. All the superfluous elements are out of the fridge and the pantry, and shopping is way easier. I can just walk around the outside of the grocery store and ignore the middle bits and the endless freezer cabinets. Clothes that I put at the back of the closet have migrated to the front again, and they feel new, saving me a trip to the mall.

It also feels as if I am acting out a micro-cosmic version of what's happening in the world (or at least the world I live in). It's as if we have all gone on a diet. We have collectively become repulsed by our greed, rampant consumerism, and overly complex institutions. We collectively shouted, "too much!" just before Christmas, and perhaps with a shared, but barely conscious wisdom, we brought the planet-eating economic "growth" to a halt. It's going to be hard. It is already hard for a lot of people. We are going to have to learn to live on a lot less. Just as millions of people in Africa, India, China etc have been doing while we have been buying more and more cheap stuff, and eating ourselves to death.

Our politicians and business leaders appear to be playing the part of my whining inner voice when my blood-sugar gets a bit low at three in the afternoon. They are resisting what has to happen. "No, don't change! Eat the cake, it's only one little slice, what harm can it do? You don't know what might happen if you try and live on cauliflower!"

Pumping unimaginable amounts of money into the economy in the hopes that we will all go back to stuffing our lives with mostly useless stuff is trying to fix the problem with the thinking that created it in the first place. It had better not work. For the planet's sake.