BY BOB BEARDEN
Earth Day drew hundreds of thousands of protestors at 600 locations around the world, including several thousand here in Oklahoma City. It was a peaceful demonstration of concerned people including a vast number of the world’s scientists.
The environment and the protection thereof should be of everyone’s concern. But we have a faction in this nation of climate deniers, science deniers. They, as Rudyard Kipling noted in his epoch poem Gods of the Copybook Headings, deny the moon is even Stilton.
There is a cause and effect for everything that we do on this our Mother Earth. Native America knows and they have always struggled to protect their environment because they have always understood that what we do to our Mother Earth must not be to bring irreparable harm to her. Soiling our own nest makes no sense whatsoever.
But we have a faction that has no conscience and has absolutely no concern for anything or anyone but their greedy quest for making money. To them nothing else matters. They don’t care one whit what they leave for their children and grandchildren, it’s all about greed and avarice for them. They want to die surrounded by their gold and silver.
The world’s climate has always been changing and it always will, but the footprints we leave upon this our Mother Earth should not be that we contributed to the fouling of our environment, it should be footprints that will prove to our antecedents that we truly cared about leaving Mother Earth as close as possible to the way we found it.
We have long known that fossil fuels are neither renewable nor sustainable. We have long known that they can and do horrendous damage to the world in which we live. In just over 100 short years we have sucked up out of the ground a huge portion of those fuels to the point now that we must drill deeper and deeper to find more. That has made them more and more expensive and more and more polluting.
We see the effects of what we have done to our Mother Earth pretty much wherever we look these days. What we are doing is slowly and inevitably causing Mother Earth to warm which is slowly but surely causing severe – often irreparable – damage to our ecosystem.
Ice caps are melting at an alarming rate and species after species of wildlife are becoming extinct. We cannot continue to sustain our world in the fashion and manner that makes it livable if we continue upon this course. That’s a fact that, of course, a lot of our politicians deny. But science is about facts not conjecture.
And now we have a president who has moved almost immediately upon his inauguration to reverse the gains we have made in environmental protections, all the while claiming to be protecting our beautiful country and its environment. The man is an inveterate liar – what he says and what he does aren’t the same thing.
He has placed a total global warming, climate denier in charge of the EPA. And he has issued several executive orders that reverse previous orders aimed at protecting our environment. The EPA has already eased restrictions on pollutants so that now the air we breathe will become more and more toxic.
Protecting our environment is one of the most important life-saving things we can do for ourselves and our posterity. We must fight back. We cannot let the ignorant asses now in charge of our environment have their way.
As Bill Nye, the Science Guy, noted recently, “Just so you know, the same people who are telling you you are wrong about unions are telling scientists they’re wrong about science.”
These clowns now in charge of our government are not only wrong about unions they are wrong about climate change and global warning. We must not let them foist their junk science upon us and the world.
Resist! It is the right thing to do and this is the right time to do it.
– Bob Bearden is a trustee with the Central Labor Federation and a member of Mayflower Congregational Church UCC in Oklahoma City
