the ONLY GREEN list

  

        

   "Everywhere I look there are opportunities to be addressing climate change and everywhere I look we are not doing it."        Bill Nye    

                                                             Ecologist Opinion, April 27, 2021

                                 NOTHING LEFT BUT TO PREPARE FOR THE WORST

The 27,000 barrels of DDT discovered in the ocean between Los Angeles and Catalina are just another brick in the wall of human destruction of our planet.

We thought the world was just so big that nothing we could do would cause anything but perhaps localized harm.  There remain folks today who can’t wrap their heads around the fact that what we’ve been doing for the past 150 years has changed Earth more than millions of years of natural change would have done.  It is a staggering thought.  Yet it is now undeniably true.

Mitchell Thomashow’s To Know the World adds an aspect to the definition of the Anthropocene that fits the moment one hears it.  Human beings have become immersed in their ‘screens’.  Social media and technology have separated humankind almost irrevocably from Nature.  Yes, we’re the ones at fault, but yes, it has been facilitated and accelerated by our disassociation from the ‘real’ world.

There are no responsible scientists left who believe the worst is not yet to come.  And those of us who trust this science know intrinsically now that the changes we have already wrought will take centuries to overcome.  Centuries.

The individualistic nature of the human being that we have so long lauded has turned out to be, in this time and place, a curse of unimaginable proportions.  We need to be together, we need to come together, we need to work together.  But we’re not.  And it’s clear now that we’re not going to.  To be sure, Biden & Company are pushing the right direction, but it’s something that needed doing 30 or 40 years ago.  Major tipping points have already been passed by.  The ‘tipping’ is now underway.

And that ghastly dump of 27,000 DDT barrels won’t be the last of such to be found.

In a recent interview, David Pogue opines that there’s been almost no material produced that addresses the next problem: what to do now.  Pogue says all we can do now is get ready.  Get ready for the consequences of what we have done.

Climate change is a done deal.  We can still get rid of fossil fuels (can we?).  We can stop driving internal combustion cars (can we?).  We can stop burning everything into the sky (can we?).  But the ever more violent floods and weather, and the wildfires and the droughts are here to stay.  We did it.  It’s on us.

Nothing left but to prepare for the inexorable changes.



                                    

                          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?   



"We can no longer continue feeding our addiction to fossil fuels as if there is no tomorrow. For there will be no tomorrow."  Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu