Mother Earth is not happy. Allowing for the natural forces that shape our world’s aqueous and land-based surfaces, and the atmosphere above them, the human species has had accumulative injurious effects of ecosystems in the oceans, lakes, canyons, grasslands, wetlands, and the air we breathe. All of the evidence shows the ways in which we have carelessly influenced climates by putrid emissions, disturbed tectonic plates by fracking, and polluted nearly anything you wish to name by being wasteful, throw-away societies.
As we sit in wonder about the raging forest fires across BC and Alberta, in the USA and elsewhere, wherein the lack of rain of any usual proportion as left the earth parched and primed for deadly blazes, and as we listen to analysts in their amazement about the number of active and potentially destructive hurricanes in the Atlantic basin, or we hear reports of the next big piece of glacial ice falling off Antarctica, we must take serious pause. Not only are people dying, animals dying, flora dying, coral reefs dying – the entire system of harmony in nature is being dramatically disrupted. It may never normalize now. It may be too late. These extremes of climatic behaviour reflect the Earth’s anger and pain. We in our smallness do not see that this is not about one emergent environmental catastrophe after another, it is about the new abnormal-normal that we have created.
Of course, there are many forces that have brought us to this tipping point of environmental unrest. There is ignorance – lack of knowledge about how the complex systems of atmospheres and oceans actually work. We have come a long way in understanding these, and now we are fearful, rightfully. There is denial – lack of interest in how things work with an accompanying doubt that we are responsible for how the Earth feels or behaves. This lack of capability to learn, read and think is pervasive and prevents us as communities or societies to do our significant part to alter the course and destinations of climactic changes, above and below the seas and the land. There is greed – many policies prevent governments and industries from being responsible. They are always breaking rules, modifying laws and ignoring facts for self-interest – the “all-mighty” dollar drives the bus. Our torturing approaches to air, water and land pollution, fossil fuel retrieval, fossil fuel dependence, and to the overuse of ores and metals offered up by the Earth…….these are among our greatest blind spots as socially responsible species. Politicians and other “leaders” who lie about our climates and their illnesses should be jailed for life. Everyone’s lives are being put at risk by their immoral and inane disregard for truth and consequences.
I am getting a little closer to the time when I can do my tour of the neighbourhood to pick up errantly dropped trash bits. It won’t make a big difference, but on days like today, it will make me feel better while I walk and hum and breathe.