I Am Project - Resourceful

While the world continues to react to the global financial crisis, I can’t help but notice the incredibly improvident decisions our leaders continue to make in shortsighted attempts to stimulate the economy while limiting their deficits. Our society’s rate of consumption has been at a completely unsustainable level for years while our environment has been continually raped to fuel yet more economic growth. So many of us were oblivious to what was happening as long as we were making a buck. Now that reality has set in and this house of cards our whole economic system has been based upon has collapsed, we seem determined to reestablish this illusion of prosperity rather than learning from our mistakes. We need leaders with vision who are resourceful enough to use this crisis as an opportunity to retool and rebuild our economic strategy into something sane and sustainable that ensures our species is viable over the long term.

So much has happened over the past couple of years that has convinced me that Ed Stelmach and his provincial government is totally clueless as to how to proceed. On one hand they have been completely uninterested in addressing the ecological disaster perpetuated in the oil sands because of the revenue these projects generate, and on the other hand they are frantically spending money and effort in an attempt to convince the Americans that our oil is not dirty and that we care about the environment.

It is projected that by 2030, between 32 and 86 percent of the Alberta government’s income will be dedicated to funding healthcare. It is a proven fact that prevention is much more economical than treatment so you would think promoting a healthy lifestyle would be a strategy the government should invest in. Yet when this economic crisis hit, after the ruling party gave itself a 30% pay increase, Ed Stelmach has cut back chiropractic funding and is talking about cutbacks to healthcare wages. The biggest cost in healthcare is salaries and the biggest cost in salaries is sick time and overtime. Wouldn’t it be more resourceful of the government to actually increase funding for chiropractic and other preventative treatments so that sick time is reduced in the work force and thus so is overtime?

I have found that when I am resourceful, I see opportunity within crisis and am able to grow and evolve even in the most challenging of situations.

“The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life” - Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919)