I’m staring out of the kitchen window one April Sunday and it’s snowing.
This time last year we were experiencing a heatwave.
It makes me wonder if this unpredictable weather is a result of global warming or if it’s a normal thing.
Even if I listened to the best scientists discussing the reasons for and against climate change, I’m not intelligent enough to understand the answers.
But whichever way I look at it, it’s unacceptable the way humankind * is treating the earth.
We pull natural, finite resources from her core, with little to no plans to replace them.
We litter the Earth’s surface with products we know will never biodegrade – they will remain on this planet long after we have disintegrated into a pile of skin and bone.
We fill the air with toxic fumes thinking “it’ll be ok, someone else can deal with the consequences.”
We tear down natural landscape, leaving animals with no home.
What part of that is acceptable?
All for our own comfort and greed.
Just because the Earth cannot speak to share her upset, does it make it acceptable?
If any animal, including humans, were to inhale factory or car fumes in excess, we would die. Yet we make Mother Nature inhale those fumes every day.
Just because she is surrounded by a vast expanse of air doesn’t make the fumes disappear.
Just because the World is perceived as big doesn’t mean we can cover her surface in plastic.
She is alive, just like us.
I struggle to come to terms with the fact that we have sent people into space, costing billions, yet we cannot invent an alternative to plastic.
It upsets daily trying to come to terms with all this.
I, too, use the resources pulled from the earth, delivered to my house by a utility company.
I, too, fill the air with fumes from my petrol car.
I, too, eat food from plastic wrapping.
I would find life difficult not to do these things.
Who’s responsibility is it to find a solution to these issues?
I understand it’s a collective effort but where should the main action come from?
Is it our responsibility, the people at ‘the bottom’ to try and find an answer, or the people at ‘the top’ – the people who tell us what to do; pay taxes, declare all personal information via Census, live by the law, have the COVID-19 vaccine – is it those people who should take responsibility and action for the damage we are doing to this planet?
I believe it’s the latter.
They like to be in charge, and they are in charge.
I wonder why they haven’t found a solution…..
Thoughts like these rattle around my head on a daily basis.
I don’t know if climate change is a thing.
I can’t guess what the consequences of human greed will be.
All I know is I wouldn’t stand for it if it was happening to me.
*the irony of the word humankind, considering as a collective we have tendencies to not be kind