the ONLY GREEN list

  

        

"Climate change isn’t so much a failure of human nature as it is the predictable result of a small number of corporations putting their profits ahead of humanity’s future and the planet’s well-being."   Jason Mark, The Nation magazine 

                                                            

                                                          Ecologist Opinion, November 14, 2020

                                       WE JUST HAD A NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE

   A RADIO COMMENTATOR on National Public Radio speaking on Friday the 13^th of November 2020 pointed out that the United States of America just had a "near death" experience, and that the recent elections forestalled that.  Over 70 million Americans have no understanding, no empathy for that point of view.  Most of those humans have little understanding of anything substantive… anything outside their mean and narrow needs.

   It’s sad to say that the 78 million on the winning side are probably comprised in about the same ratios.  Human beings are capricious, shallow and most definitely untrustworthy.  It’s no surprise that even Animal Planet lists the human as the most dangerous animal on the planet.  We’ve certainly proven to be the most dangerous force against the planet.

   But the near death experience was not just about American democracy, which will take a long, long time to recover from the madness of Donald Trump and his coterie.  Our already beleaguered natural world, which is sick as hell due to humans, also has escaped this same near death.  Trump and his ilk have already nullified over 120 of the environmental protections that the Obama years put into place.  President Biden is prepared to overwrite each and every one of those reversals the first day he takes power.  That’s a wonderful thing, yet it will still only take us back to that beginning, back nearly four years so that, once again, we can begin working toward cleaner water and cleaner air and less carbon.  Kind of starting over, and it may finally be too late for that.

   The earth has suffered under Trump’s lackeying to capitalistic forces, but really only incrementally in the scheme of things.  We’re still giving subsidies to oil companies.  We now know that even the auto companies knew they were killing the planet, but the almighty dollar today took precedence over the tomorrow of the next generation’s well-being.  Too many of those 150 million voters remain ignorant and uncaring regarding our overpopulation and how it’s exacerbating our resource depletion, our continuing pollution (air, water, plastic) and the incessant buildup of carbon everywhere.  And it’s the same world-wide.  The ignorance and attendant indifference is nearly universal for the most dangerous animal on the planet.

   Young people finally stepped up.  The younger generation had a major hand in the outcome of this election.  Most of them (as opposed to the rest of us) are starting to really get it.  The rest of us may have stood by and let our present get out of whack, but it’s their futures and they know it.  Really for the first time the young came out of the shadows and into the polls.

   The issues were manifest: the coronavirus, systemic racism, the all-pervasive economy… and the climate crisis.  It would be nice to discover that the overwhelming issue for the young was the environment, and that that was the primary driver of their march to the voting booths.  Let’s hope it’s true.

   Joe Biden is actually listening.  Let’s all message him, not just the young.

                                                                                                  From the Ecologist: I cried like a baby when it was over.                                                             Sometimes it feels like it IS over.  I wish I were more optimistic.

                          TOGETHER IN A CLOSET                                                                 by the Ecologist

Imagine that a whole big bunch of us is in a closet together.  We can make it a really big closet, but it’s a closet.   No windows and only one door.  And if we open the door, everyone dies.  So we have to stick it out and survive until tomorrow in this closet together.  We’ll always have enough air, but if we allow that guy over there to light his cigar the air will smell like cigar smoke.  For a long time.  With just that one cigar.  We're gonna have to make it past tomorrow.

But no one is willing to tell him to cut it out.  He smokes one after another and now the air is getting really bad because of it.  Someone needs to tell him to stop.  There are actually some folks being sickened by the smoke.  It looks like it’s going to have to come to the point that a group of us get together and make him stop.

That’s what Extinction Rebellion  is all about, that’s why they exist today.         Greenpeace  exists for the same reason.  Whiners and deniers say 17-year-old Greta Thunberg hasn’t offered one concrete idea about what we should do, or how we should do it.  Neither has X Rebellion or Greenpeace.  They’re all just trying to get us to STOP what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.

Like that group of us who, sooner or later, is going to go make that guy stop lighting his cigars inside our closet.

So, for yourself, what’s it going to be?  Sooner?  Or later?

"Now is the time for each and everyone of us to decide which side of history we are on." Extinction Rebellion, 4/28/19

So for you, what’s it going to be?  And when?   



"Since climate change and the global economy now affect us all, we have to develop a sense of oneness of humanity."       Dali Lama