Regarding Climate Change

[cenacle]

The following piece is from the latest issue of the journal I edit, The Cenacle. The full issue can be found at:

http://www.scriptorpress.com/cenacle/72.html

I believe this piece would be of interest to DU readers.

Peace,
Raymond

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Regarding Climate Change

I don’t know if I would use the term “global warming,” so much as climate change. And I don’t see how this is such a controversial idea since humans change the climate all the time, when we farm land, clear woods for housing, enact wars that destroy whole areas. We send pollution into the air every single day. We breed new kinds of plants & animals. We continue to grow in population in ridiculous numbers.

And I don’t need a scientist to see how humans are currently affecting the planet, & have been for a long time. I arrive at the office I work at in downtown Portland by walking down paved streets strewn with trash, passed by hundreds of cars spewing poisons into the air. Not too far from almost anyone is a factory of some kind with a cloud of black smoke coming from it. Where North America was once mostly forest it is now not. One can see these things with one’s own eyes, smell them. I do what I can, in terms of recycling, & product purchase, & using public transit. But that is a small drop in the bucket.

I respect those scientists who have & are working to help us better understand how humans are affecting the planet. I find much of what is being said to be convincing, & scary. That said, I believe there is more yet to learn & integrate with what we know now. Science is the process of theory & proof, & then more evidence, & another theory & another proof, etc. That’s why we don’t believe that the earth is the center of the universe anymore, or that there are only five planets in the solar system.

As far as legislation, I’m all for the kinds that cuts the poisons we put in the air, or in the earth, or in our own bodies. But we can’t even decide that ill or injured human beings should be cared for by doctors without ending up financially destitute & possibly homeless. We do a shit poor job at caring for our own kind, & this is reflected by how we abuse & neglect nature & the planet as a whole.

The thing I keep coming back to is that we could live in balance with each other & with the rest of the world. It is possible. Humans are capable of great innovations for all kinds of works. We can build death camps, with efficient gas chambers; we can build electric cars that get 100 miles on a single charge. We can tend a stranger in a crisis, or step over his moaning body.

I believe this planet is alive, & that is the only reason we are alive on it. Inorganic planets without water & air & so on do not support life, much less the teeming millions of kinds of life this earth supports. I believe we affect the planet & that we often affect it poorly, with short-term decisions & indifference.

Given the mystery of the future, or what calamity may or may not happen, why chance it? Why not put all of our resources into rejuvenating our race & our world? Because it’s not important enough? Because it’s too much work? Because God will take care of us? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that until something happens, a person’s rise to great power, a catastrophe, something, things will shamble along as they are, with people arguing this way & that.

We certainly can be better caretakers of our Mother Earth, the being from whom we all come, & everything we know comes, & that we return to when our lives are over. This planet is home, every inch of it. It is unimaginably beautiful, & bountiful, & that we do not cherish & keep her, like we do our families & loved ones & possessions & human institutions, is a tragedy. Whether we are able to inhabit her for the next 50 or 50,000 years is less relevant to me than how we treat her each & every day. We are of this place, but we do not own it, much as many of us act the part &, worse, the part of indifferent, abusive owners at that. We do not own this place even as each of us will live his or her whole life here & pass on here. What set of human beliefs about the sacred would argue against our home not being so?

I’ve long wondered if the planet will outlive humanity, as it was here before our kind. My suspicion is that we will eventually overwhelm its resources by sheer numbers & abuse, & either die off, or launch in the stars, to use & abuse some other place. The hope I retain, because I need to have some hope to function, is that the balance of people who don’t want things to be worse & worse will shift in greater numbers til action is taken, real action, beyond simply lowering one or another grave statistic, toward an honest reckoning with the fragility, mortality, & unspeakable beauty that this world still bears, despite all, & what good can yet come.

******

[get the red out]

1. I've never seen this much rain in my life

I am 45 years old, and I have never seen this much rain in one weekend in my life. But we've only gotten about 7 inches here in central Kentucky this weekend, places in TN have gotten at least twice that much. Nashville appears to basically be under water by what I saw on the news. If this isn't "climate change" I have no clue what to call it. It is certainly one of the more bizarre weather systems to pass through in my lifetime. I would bet that if we all thought back over recent years, in our own locations, to extremely unusual and destructive weather occurrences, we could all come up with a good sized list. I know I could.