Earth Day is my Birthday

All of our eggs are in one basket, I have said it before.

We live here, all of us-all-together and we have no place else to go.

The world is a big place and it can take a lot of damage, but the ecosystems we depend on are specialized and fragile. The world itself will survive many things that we individually and our bio-systems collectively cannot.

We are in peril, and that has never been more obvious to our generation than right now, in the era of COVID-19.

We are responsible for the care of this world. It is a sacred obligation, we have been charged with its care by our holy books, and more importantly under the aegis of common sense.

We are responsible for and to each other, we live together in this common-wheel.

The care of the world is a categorical imperative; if we do not care for it, the world may just shrug us off, or shrug just enough that a calamity will ensue that will alter our future destiny forever, changing our cultures, our languages, even our DNA.

Listen!

There are natural disasters pending, they are built into the structure of the planet, into the thinness of the mantle, and in conjunction with the heat emanating from deep within our planet’s core.

There are massive volcanoes, and there is continental drift, the geological forces at work just below our feet could easily destroy us all.

If we allow it.

There are calamities heading our way from outer-space, celestial bodies sailing through the ether, already on a collision course with Earth. There are asteroids and comments that we will collide with us, if we are unable to work cooperatively to change their course, these certain eventualities will overwhelm us. They are baked in, such disasters are existential threats.

Foreseeable events also represent opportunities for the advancement of science, and the unification of humanity. Given enough time, it is possible that we could even harness the power of the greatest volcanoes, turn their destructive energies to the benefit of humankind, or move the near Earth objects that threaten us from our path, capture them for their mineral wealth.

We need time, but more than that we need a willingness to understand these challenges, and rise to them.

We face other threats right now, immediate threats, viral pandemics, and threats of our own making.

We are changing the climate, the planet is warming.

Our oceans are becoming acidic, we are changing their salinity.

We are filling our atmosphere with toxins.

Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising

We are polluting our freshwater lakes, rivers, and streams.

We are losing topsoil, our forests and our coral reefs.

Our stewardship is failing.

We are divided, against each other…by greed which drives a short sighted political mindset, seeking and succeeding at turning people against their long-term interests.

Politicians and their wealthy patrons, silence and undermine our scientists, they cast doubt on any field of inquiry which might lead to a curtailment of their industrial enterprises, or their short-term profits.

They treat the Earth and all of its resources like it is a grab-bag full of goodies, opened for them to plunder, like children with a big stick whacking at a piñata.

Those in the most powerful positions treat the rest of us the same way, we are not people to them, we are assets, expendables. You can hear their spokespeople cajoling their followers right now, attempting to convince them that “saving” the “economy” is worth the cost of millions of lives, our children and our grandparents, our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, husbands and wives.

They are actively trying to convince us that we should accept the risk, like buying into a lottery, blithely ignoring the statistics that suggest the virus, if left unchecked, will kill between one and three percent of us.

They would sacrifice millions and millions of lives for their “economy”.

Our stewardship is failing.

We are failing.

It is Earth Day 2020, and all of our eggs are in one basket, the basket is fragile, and there is no other.

Earth Day is my Birthday.

04.22.2020