It hasn't been easy the last two days to think about much of anything other than the megastorm threatening the inhabitants of the northeastern U.S. and Canada. I wonder, in particular, about the effects of this storm on the least among us, the homeless above all. I'm not seeing much news coverage of that topic. And, of course, I'm intently concerned about the effects of Sandy on all the inhabitants of the densely populated areas affected. I have a niece in Manhattan, and good friends who are regular readers of and contributors to this blog in the region devastated by the storm.
What I am sure of is that we have failed to listen seriously to such prescient writers (e.g., John Muir, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold and many others) when they warned us that we were headed to a moment of great crisis if we did not address the ecological imbalances we were creating through our greed and lack of care for our planet.
We did not choose to listen, and the price we are paying for our obtuseness--and will continue to pay in the future--is very high, I think.
This was several days after I had written,
In my bones, I feel that these signs are just the beginning of what we will see as nature turns decisively against us as recompense for our lack of respect for mother earth. And how does anything live on this planet when nature turns against the inhabitants of the earth?
I'm far from alone in being scandalized that neither of the candidates of the two major political parties in the U.S. has chosen to address climate change honestly and openly in this election season. And I am far from alone, I'm sure, in feeling I've been ringing an ignored warning bell over and over about how we've already turned a major corner with global warming, and are only going to see more megastorms like Sandy in the future--and more heat and drought decimating food-producing areas of the world.
I also suspect I'm far from the only American Catholic who wonders what on earth the U.S. Catholic bishops mean when they tell us to base our voting choices on the pro-life stance of particular candidates, while the bishops give every appearance of ignoring the effects of their chosen "pro-life" candidates' policies on the very nexus of life on this planet.
For those who may be interested in what I've written about the topic of climate change and global warming in the past year alone, here's a selection of articles:
The graphic is a photo of Sandy from space taken on the morning of 29th October by an NOAA satellite and posted by Matthew Rosenberg to the Richmond Times-Dispatch website.
No comments:
Post a Comment