Time to think about your green contributions
At the turn of the year, taking stock fills our newspapers and TV screens as the silly season takes over the frequencies and columns with summaries of the best of this and that. How many storms, heat waves and dire climatic events was a good topic to analyse.
So rather than the passe´ New Year’s resolutions, how about we tally up what we’re doing to slow down climatic change, unless you want to Don the Trump mindset that if it doesn’t suit me and my business interests it won’t happen.
Most major world faiths see us as stewards of creation or within its cycle of re-creation, and many of us who’d deny being religious treasure the natural environment around us.
The big question is what would we do to rescue, maintain or save our planet? The cynic says why bother? Most of us, I suspect, are bothered. We don’t want unswimmable and unfishable beaches, lakes and streams.
We don’t want to have to up sticks and move inland away from storm surges, or up into the hills above the river valleys. We don’t want more tropical storms and droughts.
Unfortunately for the less than well heeled there are few large gestures we can make.
We don’t have land on which to plant forests to mop up carbon. Rural dwellers have no public transport available and as yet electric cars lack the range for those required to travel long distances.
Many of us though do collect our own water for daily use. So what can we little folk do about it?
I try to recycle all I can, decline plastic, and provide my own bags, or recycle the supermarket boxes, but that’s pretty minimal.
I admire the eco-warriors stripping the beaches of plastic bags, fishing line and net detritus, plastic bottles and the like in an attempt to have fewer seals and turtles and even whales who ingest them or are entrapped in them, die agonising deaths.
My hope is to be able to work on clean-ups on my local beach and river bank this year. It is encouraging to hear of scientists working to overcome the genetic makeup that causes coral to bleach and die as sea water heats up.
I doubt however if any meteorologist can do anything to reverse the effects of the warming sea on weather patterns.
Our province is divided on whether mining the seabed further for gas oil or iron sand will irrevocably mar our kai moana food chains.
Environmentalsts and those hoping to profit from these processes offer competing scientific rationales for what they advocate.
The local dairy industry has invested thousands on fencing streams from stock and providing ponds and vegetation to absorb leached elements from yards and paddocks.
It all leaves us confused. Who to trust? Where lies the common good of us all in our communities, our province the nation and the planet?
Even if totally selfobsessed, very few of us would be unaffected as our coastlines, harbours and waterways became no-go areas for habitation, farming and forestry.
Each of us needs to find our own place to stand on these issues.
Even if totally self-obsessed, very few of us would be unaffected as our coastlines, harbours and waterways became no-go areas for habitation, farming and forestry.
For me, though no fish eater, I hate to see us risk further degradation of our fisheries and waterways seeking to access increasingly marginal reserves of minerals.
As usual our newspaper Letters to the Editor offer little but abuse hurled from opposing towers of racism, urban myth and various types of self congratulation. Is there nowhere we can discuss these key issues courteously and honestly?
How green is your tally?