It's amazing how Western societies have commercialised this holiday as they attempt to do to nearly every important event in order to make a dollar and give the economy a boost. Our economic system is gradually poisoning the earth and, if left unchecked, will eventually kill it and we will be buried along with it.

The main cause of the Earth's possible death is human illusion. It is the illusion that we can go on having more economic growth year after year, that we can go on expanding, exploiting the poorer countries, using the Earth's resources inefficiently, and polluting our air, water, and land forever without destroying the Earth.

Our economic system does not function in meeting the needs of the worlds people and yet we try to get all the countries to conform to our economic system.

Politicians are constantly raving on about economic growth as the most important issue facing our country and it is. But the economic growth needs to be to be slowed down, not increased.

Our economic system is destroying our life force and turning us into machines designed to consume at any consequence. Most of us have jobs that produce things that other people can consume and we use the money that we earn to buy things that we need and ever-increasingly things that we just want.

Human needs are few, but our wants are insatiable. Gandhi said, “The Earth has enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed.” That is of course if we can stabilise the growth of our population.

Next year we can expect another 80,000,000 inhabitants. All these people will need just the basics to survive. What have we done to prevent such an increase in humanity?

Advertising agencies do a wonderful job of convincing us that we need certain products and even manage to persuade us to buy products that we don't even want. We are treating the Earth as our enemy instead of our friend.

Scientists are not going to solve our problems. We have more scientists than ever before and the state of affairs continue to get worse. We humans are clever but not wise. The damage done to our environment during this festive season is enormous, but few people seem to care.

Humanity is digging a huge hole that could become our grave. If one wants to get out of a hole the first thing one needs to do is to stop shoveling. Christmas, to me, is just a period of rapid shoveling. We need to re-discover our environment and develop the right relationship with the land and its resources.

The destruction of nature will be followed by by the destruction of ourselves, which seems to be the way we are headed.

I hope that everyone gets what they “need” for Christmas.

I write in relation to the story (‘War message lost in new pool names’, The Border Mail, September 21).

As the grandson, son and nephew, and brother in one of those families, I don't believe that you've yelled loud enough “people”. 

Some of the new age proponents have never lived through the challenges, nor acknowledged.