Are we going to pay attention now? - Redux
I wrote this last year after Katrina hit.
I was unable to do justice - in writing - to the human tragedy, so many others were doing it better than I, but being the daughter of an architect and engineer who travels the globe building bridges and buildings for those who want to develop in environmentally safe and friendly ways - a man who has refused large sums of money to do it otherwise - I instead wrote a post slanted toward the environment.
I’m posting it today because of the date.
crossposted at Taking Place
In the wake of Katrina many things are becoming perfectly obvious; it is obvious that we are going to have to pay attention to the more salient issues of disaster preparation, homeland security, and the cronyism that perpetrated this debacle post Katrina.
My question is: Will we now start paying attention to some of the issues which in the end may allow us to continue on through eternity, or are we going to let our apathy and lack of attention to nurturing of the environment which sustains us, destroy us?
Call me an ecology freak, or call me sensible with hopes for a future for the planet; it is time to make a choice.
In this live for today hell with tomorrow life most of us live where having the big house, going to or sending kids to the right schools, an occasional designer purse, a nice pair of Italian shoes and a BMW tend to satisfy, a world in which we view life as good if we have obtained as much for ourselves as possible in regard to the material, Katrina has made something painfully obvious.
Katrina has made us aware that even here in America there are others not as fortunate. Never mind Africa - here at home we have poor people. That in and of itself should be a slap in the face to the ignorant majority, but let us go further and look at the disaster as a whole and it’s implications for the survival of our civilization as we know it.Katrina has hopefully helped make the need to expedite this scrutiny perfectly clear.
The ecological implications are clear in that we know that there were plans which had been shelved to shore of the levees ( due to the cost), as well as plans which would have diverted water from Lake Pontrachain. We know that the water in the Gulf has warmed by several degrees over the last century and that this is directly caused by global warming. We know that in the end our inability to pay attention to our own house, because we are too busy at someone else’s house has in some ways made this disaster all the worse.
We can choose to bring ourselves back to a time where we are at one with our environment and willing to sacrifice in order to ensure a future for our country as well as our planet.
As Jared Diamond, noted professor of geography at U Cal, Los Angeles and Pulitzer Prize winner for, Guns, Germs, and Steel , shows us quite simply in his book,
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed , that we are going to need to make a decision here.
We need to look at what happens when we squander our natural resources, ignore the signals our environment gives us when we cut down too many trees, we need to look at why some civilizations such as the Mayas, the Polynesians of Easter Island, and the Vikings in Greenland disappeared off the face of the earth while other civilizations prospered.
Survival lies in the fact of ecological care, withstanding pressure from enemies slowing population growth and taking care when choosing trade partners. Diamond often extrapolates, but there is clarity in one thing, and in the face of the tragedy that was Katrina and her aftermath his point is only made more solid.We need to do something now.
My hope is that from this tragedy we will not only learn that we need to wake up and choose our government more carefully ,and then keep an eye on it; I hope this will wake the need in us to actively participate in our government, and it’s policy making.
I also hope that if we will start looking at this earth we are on and what we can do to make sure that our civilization does not disappear due to shear apathy.
We have a choice: Shall we choose to believe the pundits such as Mihkel M. Mathiesen in Global Warming in a Politically Correct Climate: How Truth Became Controversial , or do we believe the people not funded by Exxon like John Houghton Global Warming : The Complete Briefing.
I think the way is pretty clear. Don’t you?
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