BRATTLEBORO — During this Earth Day 2013 season, let us take some time to slow down, catch our breath, and begin to believe that we can finally be sensible and caring enough to stop our civilization's stampede over the environmental cliff.
I hope it's not news that all seven billion of us live on a planet that possesses limited resources. If everyone on Earth lived at the American rate of consumption, we would need four more planets. Obviously that's not going to happen.
But here's the problem: we're all committed to the multinational economic paradigm of constant growth, for which we will need more and more natural resources, a requirement patently impossible to fulfill.
Meanwhile, the corporate powers will pursue profits for their CEOs and stockholders at the expense of the planet until we go over the cliff and the human race begins an inexorable decline into oblivion.
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There is ample evidence that this decline is already happening: the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is bringing about climate change/global warming/climate disruption worldwide.
In the U.S. in March of 2012, more than 15,000 warm weather temperature records were broken. Every state in the country experienced record-high temperatures that month.
Glaciers worldwide are melting. Underground aquifers are drying up. Overall, dry areas are getting drier and wet areas wetter.
Millions of people are affected by floods. Environmental refugees are proliferating, leading to increases in violence, disease, and political instability. Agriculture is taking a hit; food is becoming more expensive. Storms are getting stronger - remember Irene and Sandy? Oceans are acidifying.
And consider the desperate scramble to extract the last remnants of coal and petroleum from the earth to keep profits rolling in.
Mountaintops are removed to mine for coal. Canadian tar sands are drilled, devastating vast areas and destroying songbird habitat. Leaks in pipelines are extremely problematic.
Oil shale is hydro-fracked, using huge amounts of water and dangerous chemicals, thereby causing earthquakes and threatening drinking-water supplies. Oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere occasionally have catastrophic spills.
Nuclear power plants produce high-level radioactive waste, deadly for a million years, with no safe method of storage. But nuke plants, at least until recently, have been very profitable.
And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has the mission of “promoting the common defense” (as though we need any more nuclear bombs). According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the world's current supply is 17,300. And please, let's not forget the ongoing discharge of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.
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Thankfully, the world is now on a course to phase out petroleum in favor of renewable energies such as wind and solar. Energy efficiency and conservation are also good bets.
Another strategy to ensure humanity's decline is to feed everyone foods derived from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure that no one finds out what GMOs are in the food they purchase.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, of course, is complicit in this deception. When Monsanto says its products are safe, the FDA says OK. The food industry in general, by infusing lots of addictive fat, salt, and sugar in our foodstuffs, is ensuring that many people become obese and afflicted with any number of maladies (which, by the way, is just fine for medical- and pharmaceutical-industry profits).
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I'm not making any of this up. Google whatever you like.
We are at a crossroads. The stakes couldn't be higher.
It's time to start connecting the dots if we want a healthy, sustainable planet.