I’m in the middle of reading Naomi Klein‘s ‘This Changes Everything‘, a book wherein she tackles the issue of capitalism vs the climate.

While I’ve not finished it yet, it’s already apparent that we’re all hostages to big energy businesses who will ride roughshod over society in pursuit of profit.

Just as we are to big business when pharmaceuticals are concerned.

There’s a theory that the cure for many diseases are already with us, including cancer, but the big pharma companies have a vested interest in ignoring it because the profits from it are too large to toss away for the benefit of mankind.

And Klein’s book pretty much shows for certain that that is how big energy companies behave too. Ignore the warnings of global warming, of burning fossil fuels, and tread on everything that gets in the way of share dividends.

We live in an increasingly fractured, dangerous world in which another big profit industry -arms- encourage us to make weaponry to sell around the globe without any moral obligations as to how they’ll be used, and maybe even encourage wars that go on around the world.

You can also add into this the (in)security industry. Today the UK announced a £2bn ‘investment’ in fighting cyber crime. Well, we could use more real money in real banks on real High Streets to counteract much cybercrime. But that isn’t government’s approach to the issue. They liked the idea of a cashless society because it meant there was a paper trail for everything. Fraud would be minimised. As usual, though, criminals are often one step ahead, inventing new scams and methods with which to undertake their crimes.

Last weekend we saw a computer glitch at one of the UK’s supermarket chains, Asda (it’s part of the Walmart Group), see all of their tills go down, causing chaos.

It appears that we’re at the mercy of a world we don’t necessarily recognise of like because ‘this is how we do it now’ (don’t get me started on the ‘pressure’ from my bank for me to do internet banking…I won’t be doing it now or in the future, despite it being ‘how we do it now’). Every bank in the UK will need to remove every branch from the streets before I am forced to bank electronically.

All of this got me thinking about how naturism is part of a simpler, less complicated lifestyle if seen as a broader concept than just taking our clothes off. True naturists will care for the environment they live in, adopting a ‘take nothing, leave only footprints’ approach to a beach (or any other space in which they practice the lifestyle). Naturists don’t poison the water where they swim, cut up the woodland and burn it for cooking. That’s the sole domain of big business, in various ways. Oil spills in our oceans, chemical spills in our rivers, the deforestation of the Amazon and elsewhere.

We -naturists- are at the spearhead, in many respects, along with a mixed bag of fellow travellers from the Rainbow Gathering hippy people to those who organise Burning Man, to indigenous ‘First Nation‘ tribes in north America, to environmentalists, alternative energy companies investing in wind and wave, to alternative lifestyle folks, to vegans, vegetarians, people with allotments and a whole lot more.

We grow vegetables without pesticides, recycle the rainwater to water the gardens, use vegetation to make compost and so on, all with one eye keenly on tending nature so that she tends for us.

There’s some ironic content in promoting these ideas while we use computers and energy to access Second Life. That doesn’t mean that we should be ignoring a message we can put out about the benefits of wind and wave power, allotments and the like.

You can buy your own wind turbine on the Marketplace.

You can also buy an allotment

Time permitting, I will, in my second tenure as editor of SLN2, be promoting this more ‘holistic’ approach to naturism, and hoping to engage naturist sim owners to, in part, reflect this more rounded approach to a wider naturism and encourage them to show their nature credentials with the inclusion of items like wind turbines, allotments, garden sheds and the like in their builds. Just demonstrating that, as part of the a wider naturism would, I think, encourage avatars to be open to the idea of a wider naturism.

That’s probably my project for 2017, encouraging people to reflect a wider naturism.

Ella