Most people are aware that we’re now in the process of a climate change emergency, yet there are those who remain deliberately disinterested in Earth’s current Holocene (sixth) mass extinction emergency.
If you’re not aware of the present extinction event, then it’s time you’re introduced to something you won’t be able to ignore. You, like everyone else, share the responsibility to do your part to try to prevent climate crisis from including human extinction. That’s our current reality.
Many environmental groups are working globally, even though it’s a challenge to get capitalistic governments to even say the words “climate change” let alone take leadership with any unified action to struggle against it.
Some speculate it’s our administration’s allies like mega-corporations — think ExxonMobile Pipeline, etc. — who are out there depleting and trashing the land all for the last drop of Earth’s resources. Our angst-ridden corporate-owned news media, knowing their place in the current regime, supply their smokescreen where needed.
Our government, along with many others in the world, are acting in the best interests of these mega-corporations. They do whatever they must to land, air, water and the living because the laws have been fixed for them, so they no longer need to be virtuous or respectable. The world is their oyster.
Our latest cautionary report comes from The United Nations telling us that one million plant and animal species will go extinct. Are there any bugs on your car’s windshield? Have you noticed a lack of birds in your yard? How about bees? Frogs?
What’s not helping is the hundreds of acres of timberland being harvested in Kitsap, Jefferson and Mason counties, making wildlife run for new cover and homes, ending up in neighboring yards. Next this same timber company wants to spray Roundup concoctions from a helicopter over those same hundreds of acres. Why?
It’s the easiest and cheapest way to get rid of weeds so that their seedlings will prosper for the next big harvest. There are other methods that work just as well as these chemicals that leach into the ground water into our wells, onto other vegetation and people and animals and cause destruction and disease.
Bayer/Monsanto and their deadly collections of poisons on the market are in a bit of a poison pickle with thousands of lawsuits lined up. Yet these timber companies still want to soak the neighborhood with this chemical spray. Bayer is a big corporation and now in big trouble with the people.
And it’s all legal. Most stores are still selling Roundup and it’s other various names.
Much of our food has been poisoned by this vile product. And the EPA says that’s all right. No, it’s not all right! What about our children, our grandchildren, our own future health?
This is now a “climate emergency,” no longer just “climate change.” Everything depends on what the people decide to do.
It shouldn’t be difficult for any of our governmental representatives to simply say they’ll stop this poisoning no matter what it takes. But they have failed us time after time. Each politician needs to be replaced. They must learn to do our bidding.
We must also change our own relationship to the Earth, viewing it as a living, breathing partner that we rely on for survival. Note: we can’t destroy Earth, but Earth can cause humans to become extinct.
This is a battle for a sustainable world, this is a fight for survival. What are you willing to do?
Olds is a Kitsap opinion columnist. Reach her at marylin.olds@gmail.com.
