It’s always the catastrophe du jour, isn’t it? We can’t keep our eye on the ball for more than a minute before we have to have another horror story to entertain ourselves with. So we go from war to environmental catastrophe to skyrocketing oil prices to threatening Depression to–well, whatever the news media thinks we want to see, for ratings, and the advertising money.
But the environmental catastrophe is still there, and it’s all part of a giant ball of disaster that really links together, but we seem to want to break it up in easily digestable lumps, and when it is digested–it’s over, isn’t it? We don’t have to remember, do we?
Well, we do, because it is all still there, the same thing, not discrete lumps, but a seething mass that has to be addressed, because our failure of our stewardship of the earth is directly related to our lust for consumer goods which is directly related to our wars and our economic meltdown, and each of these to each other. So there is no part of this that does not relate and combine and self-reinforce. There is neither chicken nor egg, nor something that can be forgotten in the next news cycle.
So when we travel this holiday–those of who can still afford to travel–maybe we should think a little about buying some carbon offsets to make up a little for all that flying and driving. After all, we have to pay this “tax” eventually. Either way pay for it now, upfront, or we pay for it later, down the line, in severely reduced standard of living and degraded environment and shorted lifespans. Not paying for our carbon production now is also stealing from our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, who have no say in what we do here.
This catastrophe is still here. It will be here long after the current economic conniption is over–and will get worse once it is over, unless we recognize that the problem will not go away until we change how we live our lives and relate to the planet and to each other.
Please. Don’t forget.
