Our lifestyle and human organisation are packed with invisible monsters that affect our comfort of life and prospect of a sustainable future. These monsters are real but the fact that they cannot be seen caused their neglected by the large public. Often it seems that “what one cannot see does not exist” type of mentality reigns.

We protect our children from the traffic in the streets by telling them to look twice before crossing. We even make them touch a car to get a feel of how hard the material is that would hit you. But do we know how healthy the air is in which the children play? Do we know how healthy the food is that they eat? The water they drink?

Millions of people around the world get sick because of the short and long term effects of air pollution and malnutrician. Our children are affected by these invisible monsters at school, in the street where they play and even at home where they are supposed to feel safe.

We can take responsibility for the safety and health of our selves and our children for those things that we can see and touch but when it is invisible and beyond our control we cannot. The problem of the invisible monsters is that we may be scared of them but they have been created by our life style. The consumer society has been structured in such a way that health is secondary to profit. So these invisible monsters are in fact us, through our behaviour.

Even if we would want to take responsibility we cannot because we depend on the global industrial and delivery processes that we created to produce and distribute our products. We depend on our cars to get us from A to B and our supermarkets to supply us with our food.

We don’t know who controls what and where what comes from. Our responsibilities have been taken over by complex power systems and processes that provide us with the luxury of comfort and the discomfort of invisible monsters. We have built economies around consumption of goods. New economies have risen around the effects of consumption and the pain caused by the invisible monsters. But if we want to attack those monsters we have to attack our selves and everything that we have created so far: our systems, our lifestyle and our economies.

Those monsters have grown so big lately that they have become a larger crisis than all crises summed up. Who is going to deal with these monsters before they eliminate us like myxomatose did with the rabbits? Because that is what they are, self inflicted deceases that eat us up from the inside. They represent a humanitarian crisis, an economic urgency and a severe risk for our current and future generations.

It is high time to work together, make those monsters visible and take responsibility to eradicate them from our existance.

http://www.aireas.com is one of such initiatives that gives it a try.