SHADOW OF A DROUGHT – The Price We Pay for Ecological Short-sightedness

Does anyone really think the future will be about how many jobs the earth’s raw materials can generate for human beings? How much of the forest we can clear-cut for grazing and pave over for development?

Can't we do better than selling off our nation's precious wild places—set aside by visionary leaders for all Americans to enjoy in perpetuity—to the highest bidder?

Is the true measure of our prosperity how fast, cheap and easy we can get from one place to another in unsustainable conveyances? Is it how many of the resources lying on or under the ground we can extract for our comfort and convenience?

I’ll tell you what comfort and convenience are. Comfort is not being among the
150 to 200 million people living on land that will end up awash in rising seas or recurring floods by the end of the century, assuming our emissions of heat-trapping gases continue on their current trend.*

Comfort is not being one of the countless species of life whose habitat is being destroyed by human beings at the rate of six square miles PER HOUR. ** Convenience is not having to walk miles to find water that doesn’t make your family sick.

   Comfort is not being displaced...only to find  
   backward-looking reactionaries campaigning to 
   lock you out of the very “nation of immigrants” 
   which once welcomed their own ancestors.

Convenience is not losing your home or your life to one of the steadily escalating number of climate-change-induced extreme weather events worldwide—floods, droughts, tsunamis, heat-waves and other disasters. ***

Comfort is not being displaced, as hundreds of thousands of families are,**** with nothing but the shirt on your back, by a combination of economic, political and environmental conditions around the world—only to find backward-looking reactionaries in the U.S. campaigning to lock you out of the very “nation of immigrants” which once welcomed their own ancestors.

WHO THEY'RE DEALING WITH
Tell everyone you know—friends, family, colleagues and fellow church members —to think not just about a short-term vision of economic development, law and order and national security, but about the long-term health and sustainability of this precious planet’s natural and human resources. Implore them to consider not just their own well-being, but that of their children and grandchildren.

Urge them to defend their ownership—as guardians, not consumers—of federally protected special places. And to speak up about it in their social circles, in the media and to their congressional representatives.

* Climate Central – www.climatecentral.org
** World Wildlife Federation – www.worldwildlife.org
*** Big Picture – https://bigpictureeducation.com
**** World Economic Forum – https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/12/10-migration-trends-to-look-out-for-in-2016/