“No more coal, no more oil, keep your fossils in the soil.” So we chanted as the community joined Fort Lewis College Environmental Center students in the Nov. 5 climate march.
“The Reel Film Experience” movies were excellent: “Time to Choose” showcased the world’s great at-risk seacoast cities along with tragic scenes of West Virginia’s mountaintop mining removal. As Naomi Klein points out in This Changes Everything, our economic system, capitalism, is on a collision course with nature. Business as usual isn’t working.
Journalist David Kirby’s Nov. 11 article detailing a landmark study in Science describes how climate change at only 1 degree Celsius has already interfered with more than 80 percent of biological processes, including genetics, body mass, sex ratios, productivity and other physical changes affecting humans as well as plants and animals. The study compiled thousands of published case studies to provide a collective voice of research around the globe and across disciplines on impacts of climate change. The word “productivity” especially caught my attention.
I was reminded of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel – and the 1990 adapted movie – The Handmaid’s Tale. Set in a dystopian, near-future, right-wing religious North America, pollution is so severe that reproduction is difficult and a “good baby” becomes cause for celebration. Young women with rare fertility are essentially put into sexual slavery; other women are relegated to various groups depending on desirability and obedience. Definitive wardrobes are assigned to easily distinguish and monitor each group. Unsettling images.
Scottish naturalist Sir John Lister-Kaye writes (At the Water’s Edge) that he is angered by politicians who refer to “addressing the climate issue” as if white papers or tax regime tweaks could solve the problem, saying: “We are powerless before the might of nature ... If we screw up altogether, we perish; but the planet goes on forever.” He suggests backing off to let nature heal itself. Human extinction (which also means extinction of other species) could be the salvation of our planet. Like the bumper sticker says: “Mother Nature Bats Last.”
Marilyn McCord
Vallecito
