PHONE HOME

Real Estate Journal

PHONE HOME

By Bill Barksdale GRI Realtor®

“Phone Home” the stranded visitor from another planet says in the movie E.T. The extra-terrestrial is sheltered and loved by the children who find it and care for it and protect it from adults who want to find and study it, even kill it. The extra-terrestrial understands the protection and even love of these children, but wants to be with its own kind again. When it learns about telephones ET invents a way to phone home, to let its fellow creatures know it’s still alive and needs their help to get home.

What is “home”? If this gets to woo-woo for you then you can choose to stop reading now. My column is often written with both the left and right sides of my brain. You can get the nuts and bolts of real estate from others or come and sit with me in my office and I can explain contracts, inspections, escrow and title matters with you there, as I’ve been doing for nearly 30 years.

“Home” in real estate is usually a house. I’ve helped thousands of people with their housing matters over the years and continue to, but there is a more expansive concept of “home” too.

Recently I heard a scientist who studies the Earth as an ecosystem, a unified whole, interviewed. Her research has shown that Earth is much more akin to another movie, Avatar. Her studies have documented that life on our planet is literally connected. The plant life is connected and actually communicates and feels. We, as living creatures are connected and our intuition is our guide and in some way, our connection. When you ignore your feeling of what is right, deep down inside, you ignore life itself.

If that is true then there is an awesome respect one must have for our home planet. I recently got a DVD from the library about the Hubble space telescope. The Hubble has given us humans the awe-inspiring ability to look out into space, what happened millions even billions of light years ago. With its filters and electronics and lens it can literally see galaxies forming. It can zero in on other galaxies and planets.

One thing Hubble has not yet seen is another planet like Earth, our home. They may be out there, but even with its amazing abilities to send us information and views of what’s beyond our home, we still haven’t seen another life-sustaining planet – not life as we know it at least.

Why am I talking about this in a real estate column? As I’ve said many times before the Realtor® Code of Ethics begins with “Under all is the land”. Our planet’s life-sustaining land, and I might add waters and air.

When we don’t respect the land and our vast oceans and bodies of water, when we don’t respect the vegetation and fellow life forms, when we pollute with chemicals and plastics and mow down the forests and other plant life – we literally destroy our Home. Hubble has shown us that, as far as we know, Earth is unique. If there is anything else out there even remotely like our home, Earth, we’ve have no evidence of it. Even as the Hubble looks back in time, given the speed of light, 186,282 miles per second, it has never detected another Earth-like planet.

To those who can’t think beyond their own short lifetime and think nothing of creating and wasting plastic, creating and spraying toxic chemicals, dumping oil on the ground, polluting the water and the air – I can only say “You are an idiot, at best very ignorant”. You are contributing to the destruction of the only place that we know of in the universe that can sustain life as we know it. When our world’s governments and politicians and those irresponsible scientists and financiers and just plain folks, destroy Earth – how do they expect there to be a place for future life to exist? 

What about the children of today and generations to come, what kind of place will they have to live? Every drop of toxic chemical, every piece of plastic or nuclear waste buried, adds up to nothing less than death. You might say to yourself, “Well there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just one person and the problem is too big for me to have an impact.” 

Let me say that you vote with your dollars and actions. We all do. If we cut back and then stop buying and using the chemicals and plastic packaging and products that kill – things will change. Market forces will demand needed change. There is a proven, documented web of life on planet Earth. However much you may see yourself as having no meaningful impact on that web of life, you and future generations will only survive if you – personally – make responsible decisions that affirm life. 

If you hate yourself and our shared home, you can choose to change that thought. When you change and respect yourself and this place we call home, you make a difference. When we do it in mass, we have an even greater impact, but it begins with you and your personal choices and actions. 

Will we have a place to “phone home” if we let others or even ourselves put short-term profits before life itself? I’ll answer that question for you. Of course not. So start now making responsible choices. Every drop of loving, responsible action makes a difference. Soon those drops create an ocean of life, a web of life instead of a path of destruction. The choice you personally make each moment of your life is a step on the path.

Bill Barksdale was a 2016 inductee into the Realtor® Hall of Fame. He is an agent at Coldwell Banker Mendo Realty Inc. He can be reached at 707-489-2232, bark@pacific.net