The Sustainable Life

Our entire way of life is built upon an unsustainable process of extracting raw materials from the Earth without considering the impact of our actions.  We take, and take, and take, but we never give back.  Imagine you went over to your friend’s house, raided their fridge, threw the garbage on their kitchen floor, and then left for the next house down the street.  In a way, this is how industrial humans have been treating the Earth.  Unfortunately, we’re beginning to run out of or have already ran out of both houses and fridges to raid.   Plus, we’re not only running low on resources — all that garbage that we threw on the floor is beginning to make our friend the Earth very, very sick.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama invoked the concept of confronting climate change as a national imperative.  I completely agree with that sentiment.  The nation cannot afford to stand by idly as the world changes in unpredictable and likely detrimental ways, especially when our actions may be a major cause of the change.

But this idea is not shared by everyone.  Even more problematic is that the concept of climate change being real is often wrongly regarded as only a slim possibility.  It is not only possible, it may already be underway.  The truly scary prospect of climate change is that it is already too late.  We humans tend to forget that we have only been on this planet for a sliver of its existence.  The climate has been in a constant state of flux long before we arrived, but only now has that flux been adversely affected by a species living on Earth.  We as a collective are altering the natural ebb and flow of the Earth.  This is the fact of the matter.

Nearly all (I’m thinking close to 98%) of scientists would support the idea that humans are going to be a direct cause of significant climate change that will occur in the foreseeable future.  And this is the problem.  People, for whatever reason, think that because they can find 2 scientists out of 100 who are skeptical of climate change being caused by human activity that means that climate change can be ignored.  Why would anyone be able to believe this?! This is like Russian roulette on steroids.  Someone with one gun with six cylinders and five bullets is trying to get lucky!

Climate change legislation is needed now.  The change may not seem drastic, but people have to remember that just because something happens slowly this does not mean that it is not happening at all.  This is no longer a problem for future generations, but a problem for the current generation.  Let’s hope that our leaders decide to embrace the sustainable and fruitful future that awaits us if we embrace the necessary change.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.