The great art of doing nothing
Of late there seems to have been a lot of ink splashed on the pages of our newspapers about how the Arctic ice is disappearing, how the Gulf Stream is slowing, how typhoons, cyclones and hurricanes are spinning destruction at accelerated rates, and the spectacular drought in Australia reaches one in a thousand year frequency. Closer to home, the summer has almost refused to fade away, Ontario’s much vaunted Great Lakes are at the lowest levels since lake levels began to be monitored, while we in the Maritimes record the latest date for a day time high in the thirties, and salmon die in rivers because the waters are too warm. Yet amid all the hoopla regarding climate change, it seems that the majority of people don’t get it or want to get it. It really does seem as though only a handful of people are concerned about it all. Or the media in search of yet another story to grist through the daily mill of news horrors.
I spend a goodly amount of time talking about climate change, to pretty much anyone who will listen. And I have for these past thirty years been trying to get people to listen. I am not a Nostradamus or Oracle In fact my publisher, Lesley Choyce, owner and operator of Pottersfield Press, writer, musician, professor at Dal is going to publish my next offering. Yes, its about climate change
Really not much has changed, except for the fact that the hot air quotient has upped a notch. As I look around me, I see business as usual. Bigger faster cars are still derigeur. Ads talk about speed, creature comforts and SUVs that can rip through any terrain, chase squirrels up trees and churn through fossil fuels.
I then read yet again, buried in the back pages of the newspaper, something that should make all of us sit up and notice. Tim Flannery, a climate change expert from Australia, says that after reading all the reports, all the studies, which by the way, are almost to a scientist telling us that climate change is happening, that we have reached the threshold where we are now at risk of dangerous climate change. Not in two years, not in ten years, not in twenty, but now.
And still we argue and obfuscate and do nothing. How much longer can we do nothing? The tank is empty and we are now running on fumes.