A "Legacy" Challenge To:
Farmers/Landowners, Doctors, Lawyers, and Other Citizens
Please use your resources to help safeguard humanity’s long-term physical and spiritual health. Please consider foregoing a large home, expensive automobiles, and other status symbols and use the savings to maintain or purchase as much land as possible. One could restore the home already on the land or build a small home and strive to lower humanity’s impact on the land by preserving farmland and restoring wildlife habitat. Government programs, financial incentives, low property tax rates, and other factors may help one achieve these goals. Then, at the proper time, one could donate the development rights to a nonprofit organization and take advantage of income tax incentives (while maintaining ownership of the land). By protecting and restoring wildlife habitat, the overall health of farming and our life-support system will increase. Biodiversity is God's gift that sustains our fresh water, clean air, crops, and farming operations in the first place and biodiversity cannot survive on farmland and urban areas alone.
The long-term health of farming and all other aspects of society depends on biodiversity. Wildlife habitat, farmland, urban areas, and other development activities must maintain the proper balance on a finite planet. Currently, farming, ranching, mining, logging, and urban areas dominate the landscape at the expense of biodiversity. The problem is not the loss of farmland or any other development activity to biodiversity preservation (which has been seriously neglected by humanity for hundreds of years); it’s the unrelenting growth of human population, urban areas, pollution, and wasteful consumption. Citizens must immediately voice their concerns to religious leaders and government officials so that population growth, contraceptive services, immigration policies, and wasteful consumption are addressed on a global level—especially in the U.S. where population growth, consumption, and immigration are extremely high.
It’s a simple concept for a finite world; more and more people means less and less space to maintain our global life-support system and no amount of religious dogma, political spin, junk science, or denial can change this simple, yet, unpopular fact. Farmers, landowners, doctors, lawyers, ministers, engineers, scientists, teachers, civic & business leaders, developers, bankers, stockbrokers, real estate agents, white & blue collar workers, miners, loggers, and all other citizens need to step back and reflect on the state of God's creation and our life-support system. On a clear night, look up into the heavens and ponder its structure and distance; one will quickly realize how truly fragile and wonderful our small planet is among the stars...
Please set the example and preserve as much land as possible (both locally and globally)—recruiting others to duplicate your efforts. We’re confident that your heart, soul, and happiness will be lifted from the experience of protecting God's creation and humanity’s long-term physical and spiritual health.
A human being is part of the whole...He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty...We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
—Albert Einstein
For additional information on protecting land and biodiversity, please email us.
William C. Gladish, Director