Waking The Dead 4

It has taken a threat so dramatic and all-encompassing as climate disaster through human activity to start slapping some of us awake. Now that we are beginning to see and experience catastrophic climate phenomena, it is becoming very difficult to keep our heads up our hienies, especially now that our hienies are starting to get kicked so hard that it is giving us headaches. So far, so good. There is still a kind of faint hope clause that we might also be entering a mini ice age such as the one that hit the world between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries and that could help ameliorate the impact of global warming, but not so fast, Emily! All the scientific models suggest that this is going to be it. The Big It. Will things really be as bad as they say? Could be. Could be even worse. Maybe not so bad. But this doesn't let us off the hook. We have already poisoned the earth. Species extinctions are accelerating and there is nothing we can do to turn back the clock. Now, it's damage control. I still don't see a lot of compelling evidence that enough of us are rising to the challenge and our governments are so lame and lily livered in their pallid attempts to sign international treaties and agree to phase out fossil fuels, and really because they still want to keep Big Oil happy and quiet and ready to go on polluting their way to the bank. Too little too late, methinks. Big oil is still calling the tune and our photogenic prime minister is one of their favourite blow-boys, or so it seems. Four and a half billion of our money he has shelled out to Kinder organ (whoops, I meant to say Kinder-Morgan, but, hey Gentle Reader, that is not at all a bad Freudian, dontchathink?) for their bloody pipeline, which would be up and running just in time for the new apocalypse which that fiendish project is simply going to hasten our way. If Trudeau's a rent boy, he's a pretty stupid one. Maybe He got us to pay him, but now he is paying them, his big fat American johns! With our money, natch. A lot of folks still don't want to give up their cars, they don't want to make sacrifices. They don't need their cars. Nobody needs a car. Hello? I have heard one excuse after another for these idiots clinging to their little planet destroyers and it all comes down to laziness, arrogance and a supreme lack of imagination. It's axiomatic that one of the last sacrifices for seniors to have to make is giving up their cars, and even then it's a matter of prying their keys from their cold dead fingers and that final loss of independence will kill them, but at least they will no longer have a chance to kill someone else with their driving. I have lived my entire life without a car. Perhaps it hasn't always been super-convenient, but I have survived, I'm no worse off, and likely in a lot of ways, I am in much better shape than a lot of you chronic drivers. It sometimes seems that for a lot of people, their own comfort, convenience and worst of all their egos are way more important than saving the planet and living in a way that is less selfish and more sustainable. So, how do we wake those zombies up, because it is their stubborn intransigence that is particularly keeping things from moving forward. I sometimes wonder if it might be time to curtail some of the freedom that we take for granted, for the laws to change and that car ownership and meat-eating be declared a felony. For that to happen there would have to be a huge push towards enshrining and protecting the rights of Mother Earth and the rights of all species to live in a safe and sustainable natural environment. But we live in a democracy, you know, and the pushback from the mouth-breathers would be so fierce that they would probably still be dickering about not wanting to give up their cars or their steak and prime rib while sea levels are rising and drowning island nations, while killer hurricanes, heat waves, fires and floods, are rendering large swathes of the planet unfit for human life or food production, and the beautiful earth we once knew, loved and took for granted and abused and destroyed is but a lovely memory while many of us stumble weeping to an early tomb.