If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself, and make a change

-        - Michael Jackson, Man in the Mirror

The news of Michael Jackson’s passing ranks up there with Elvis Presley and John Lennon – absolutely shocking . My thoughts go out to his children, brothers, sisters and other close family and friends.

That said, let me make an analogy between the life and times of Michael Jackson and that of Mother Earth, and hopefully we can take away a lesson on our relationship with this planet we call home.

As an infant, Michael likely lived a life of innocence and was, as we all know,  groomed at an extremely young age for future stardom. Although his innocence and childhood did not last long, Mother Earth did have a relatively long period of innocence until recently. This planet has gone through many physical and chemical changes over its lifespan of a few billion years, but none so rapid as what it has experienced over the last 50 years or so, thanks to the human species.

As Michael’s talent (his natural resource) became more apparent, so did the demands on his time, as well as his personal pressure to keep topping ‘Thriller’.  As that pressure mounted to top something from his own history, perhaps Michael would have been better off looking forward to doing what should have been right for him – writing and performing for his own health and happiness.

The same thing has happened with our dependence on oil, a substance that has been exploited by for less than two-hundred years. We have relied so long on what we believed to be the best thing to support our demand for energy and lifestyles. Much like was has apparently happened with Michael Jackson, the demand for something on which we so relied so much on from the past has resulted in a truly sad ending.

This quest, looking backward in time instead of forwards, is causing a possible humanitarian crisis of unprecedented consequences, much like what likely brought Michael Jackson to his unfortunate and untimely end.

Perhaps we can take a lesson from this tragedy and be smarter about how we plan our lives for the next few years, decades and centuries. We have to look forward for our own health and well being and not think that what worked in the past will work tomorrow – it doesn’t seem to work that way.