Monday, April 22, 2019

What Have We Done to Our Fair Mother?

It's Earth Day, the Google doodle told me so... I'm not exactly optimistic about the fate of OUR planet, though THE planet will do fine (though we will pretty much take down all of our pretty, fragile fellow Earthlings, life will go on without us if we continue on our current path). The stories of marine life being killed by ingested plastic are disgusting, especially in light of revelations of systemic inaction nullifying personal virtue. There are virtual continents of garbage and the petrochemical industry is spending crazy amounts of money to delay, if not prevent, development away from fossil fuels, and the fact that the same organizations that fight climate action fought to obfuscate the link between smoking and health problems is a sick joke. Put succinctly, we are engaged in a global suicide pact so that a tiny minority of individuals on the planet can make shittons of money.

I am not ordinarily a 'downer', but this is a topic I have been harping on for the past decade of blogging. Take a walk outside, and gauge how long it takes to find a plastic bag stuck in a tree or blowing down the street. Check out the health statistics for asthma or for any of a number of cancers. Read up on plummeting insect populations (no worries, Monsanto will partner with Raytheon to build pollinator microdrones). It's pretty damn infuriating... the next quarter's profits are more important than the long-term survival of our species. The real shame is that we are taking the charismatic megafauna with us, though life is resilient and new ecological niches will develop on the flotsam and jetsam we'll leave behind, occupied by slimy little critters that don't tug at our heartstrings.

The title is a riff on a line from a song by the Doors, a band which I, like David Crosby, think is overrated... I think David Crosby is overrated too, though he has some good environmentalist content on his Twitter feed.

2 comments:

Al said...

"Wooden Ships" written by David Crosby and Paul Katner was released 50 years ago. One of the most beautiful and sad songs written about the aftermath of nuclear war. And in those years since that song was written the world seems to have become more and more on the brink of not only nuclear catastrophe but also climate catastrophe. Maybe humanity doesn't deserve this beautiful blue planet were we live. We seem bent of destroying the air we breath and the water we drink, and like you said, humanity is also destroying the other truly innocent Earthlings. It's probably to late but the only thing that could save our environment is the total destruction of modern industrial civilization. I'll be 70 years old this year and I never had children. That's probably the most positive thing I've done during my time on this orbiting madhouse.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

I still think that humans can change course, but we have to have real democratic change rather than continuing to let the oligarchs continue to take us on this suicidal path.