The problem with the world is that no one really cares. The little man blames big business. Corporations say that nothing can be done until the individual takes action, and in the end, it's everyone who suffers.
The infamous "They" say that within the next century, most of Northern Canada will no longer be safe to live in due to our desperately needed comforts of hair sprays and oven cleaners. Antarctica has been that way for several years now. I came across an article on the front page of the Montreal Gazette some time ago where some scientist from some institution or another was nicely explaining how it was considered kin to child abuse to let your children outside into the dangerous sunlight to play between the hours of 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
But the ozone isn't our only or most serious problem. We can always start moving closer and closer to the equator to escape our unseen problem in the sky until were all packed so tightly into the centre of the planet that we'd make Japan seem spacious.
There's also the reality that every 2 seconds, a child dies of starvation and malnutrition. After violence, the highest cause of death in El Salvador is gastro intestinal disease due mainly to drinking water you wouldn't give your neighbour's dog. Every 2 seconds!. That's 43 200 a day, 302 400 a week. Almost 16 000 000 in just one year!
True some say that if all those children lived, there would be a food shortage throughout the globe, rich and poor alike, all would become unfortunate. But if only 10% of the American consumption of meat and poultry were cut, the grain and clean drinking water that would be saved, could feed the 60 000 000 people who die from starvation each year worldwide.
We hear so much about toxic dumping in our rivers, lakes and oceans, you have to boil the spring water you buy at your supermarket. When is something going to be done about it? You hear about plants getting caught dumping toxins illegally into our rivers all the time.
Then we find recycling companies illegally dumping in dumpsights and landfills. Plastic gum wrappers, chocolate bar wrappers, and potato chip bags clutter our streets. So called 'enviornmentaly friendly' diapers, that take eons to decompose. Styrofoam plates and cups fill our landfills by the billions. Plastics, C.F.C.'s, dead batteries by the billion, and still it continues. How much garbage can be shot into space?
As a result of rain forest depletion, approximately 1000 species are put into extinction each year. Almost 90% of our medicines come from rain forest plantlife, and as we continuously cut down our forests, so too do we cut down our chances of ever finding cures for cancer and A.I.D.S. I wonder what would happen if everyone stopped and realised that it takes 20 000 trees to print the Sunday edition of the New York Times. Imagine how many trees go into making something as simple as our telephone books. Or that Canada's old growth forests are used to make chopsticks, (500 million a day to China alone!).
Why not make 411 free and save millions of God's creatures each year?
There's enough kelp in the oceans to feed the entire world indefinitely. Why not utilise it? The sun (when it's not trying to kill us with it's poisonous ultra violet rays that now reach us as a result of our lasiness and self centeredness) gives us all the power we could ever want if we tap into it, and yet we still deplete our planet of it's precious oils and natural gases.
Like I said, the little man blames big business, the corporations say that nothing can be done until the individual takes action, and nothing gets done. Maybe it's time to stop throwing the blame and start joining hands and working together to save our dying world.
An old Native proverb states: "we did not inherit the land from our ancestors, we're merely borrowing it from our children."
The scientist is now finding out that which the mystics have always known. This planet we call Gaia is a living entity. And as one must operate to remove a cancerous tumour, so too might we find our planet operating on itself, removing that which keeps it from health. Us.