There are times, when knowledge of how quickly our planet is dying assaults the mind, so that a person might feel like giving up and abandoning all hope. Why not just pop a top, light a fag, sit back in the front porch rocker, and watch the strangely fluorescent-colored magenta sunset?
It's that kind of a day today, as we read via McClatchy News Service a chronicle of our dying oceans headlined "Growing low-oxygen zones in oceans worry scientists."
Lower levels of oxygen in the Earth's oceans, particularly off the United States' Pacific Northwest coast, could be another sign of fundamental changes linked to global climate change, scientists say.
They warn that the oceans' complex undersea ecosystems and fragile food chains could be disrupted.
In some spots off Washington state and Oregon , the almost complete absence of oxygen has left piles of Dungeness crab carcasses littering the ocean floor, killed off 25-year-old sea stars, crippled colonies of sea anemones and produced mats of potentially noxious bacteria that thrive in such conditions.
This is something almost too horrifying and depressing to even think about -- our beautiful northwest coast becoming a huge marine dead zone. How can anyone, particularly one who lives in this part of the country, deal with such information?
But a moment's thought tells us that we can't give up, that that would be the totally wrong thing to do. We certainly do need to stop debating with the imbecile flat earth society, and light a fire under government that will spur them into taking the actions necessary to at least attempt to salvage some of the life-sustaining features of our dying world. But ultimately we have no control over what governments do or don't, and for each of us individually the most important thing is to keep that dream alive.
Personally, I have dreams and hopes and aspirations that are driving me insane. I dream of paradise here on earth, attained by throwing off and abjuring the lifeways and habits that have brought us to this unsustainable place. I dream of living differently, of being physically fit and active and self-reliant.
Maybe these are silly dreams, and I'm dreaming them at an age when people are generally supposed to have given up such imaginings. But those dreams, hopes, and aspirations are what keep me going. And maybe it's a dream to think that the oceans and the atmosphere can recover, but I believe they can if we would just start treating them right. I may not live to see this happen, but that doesn't mean it can't.
1 comment:
I'm with you on clinging to hope that sanity will develop. I was reading about geonomics at www.progress.org, but that gave me the idea that since wealth comes from the earth's resources which are everyone's, each person should get an equal share of the total.
However, the overpopulation problem that is behind environmental destruction has yet to be addressed. So I would modify the idea with the important proposal that the share is not based on the individual, but on the family line, with everyone in the world getting an equal share at the inception of the program. But, as the size of the family goes up due to births, each member of the extended family gets a smaller piece of their pie.
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