It’s almost impossible to read/watch the news without seeing something about climate change; how it’s affecting weather, ocean levels, health, crops and livestock. There is also the ongoing debate about whether it’s real, whether it’s caused by man, and whether or not we can stop it.
Personally, whether it’s real, or not, doesn’t matter.
Even if you take the stance that it isn’t happening, or its a natural fluctuation in the weather that we can’t affect, there is something that can’t be argued.
We are poisoning our planet and ourselves.
This isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, a surprise to anyone. It’s common knowledge there’s PCBs and mercury in fish, industrial chemicals in our rivers. Rivers and lakes are choked out and poisoned by algae blooms, fed by run off from farms. There are seas of plastic in the middle of the ocean. Oil spills, smog, desertification…
I’ll stop here, but certainly not from lack of items to add to the list.
Regardless whether climate change is something we caused or can effect, we all need to eat, drink and breath.
Some people will argue that we are healthier now and live longer than ever in history. That is true, but for how much longer? Right now we are in the midst of the largest species die off since the dinosaurs; the majority of which is caused by us, through pollution and loss of habitat. We have the luxury of being able to separate ourselves from the world around us somewhat, but not completely, and not forever.
We are reaching a tipping point.
We may be healthy and long lived now, but we can continue poisoning the world around us for only so long before it has a substantial impact on us. We already have to worry about contamination in the fish stocks that haven’t been over fished, antibiotics and hormones in meat, and listeria and e-coli in our produce.
So What to Do?
A lot of people feel like anything they do personally will be too small to have an impact, when opposite is true. It will only work when everyone works towards cleaning up the environment. Most North Americans already know what to do. We’ve been hearing about it for 30 years. The EPA has a good list of ways to reduce your personal pollution.
The interesting thing is the majority of things we need to do to reduce pollution also happen to be the the same things we need to do to address climate change, so reducing pollution, whether you believe in climate change or not, is in everyone’s best interest.