I am the reason the birds are missing… I am made of dirt and grit and stars and river, skin, bone, leaf, whiskers and claws. I am a part of you, of this, nothing more or less. I am mycelium, petal pistil and stamen… I am energy and I am dust. I am wave and I am wonder. I am an impulse and an order.*
(Eve Ensler)

Consumption is an activity so different from gainful labour that it showed itself in the mode of leisure, even indolence. We display the success of what we have done by not having to do anything. The more we use up, therefore, the more we show ourselves to be winners of past contests.**
(James Carse)

At the same time as struggling with the cause and affect dynamic, we have been able to exponentially increase the magnitude of the cause.

Eve Ensler comes to terms with 2.9 billion birds begin lost in only fifty years in North America and writes an apology to the Earth taking her share of the responsibility:

Mother, I am the reason the birds are missing. I am the cause of salmon who cannot spawn and the butterflies unable to take their journey home. I am the coral reef bleached death white and the sea boiling with methane. I am the millions running from lands that have dried, forests that are burning or islands drowned in water.*

If we are to be the solution then we must first see that we are the problem, not someone else only, not the system only, not big business only, not governments only – governments would be far happier leading green change if they thoughts people would vote for them:

The art of solving problems often involves spending time and energy on what you’ll do when you don’t actually solve the problem.^

(*Eve Ensler, quote in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Losing the Birds, Finding the Words … .)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: “I don’t know how it could fail.”)