Columnist sums up planet’s plight

To the editor: Terribly troubling, for sure, but how powerfully and truly insightful are columnist Jim Taylor’s words in the Sept. 4 Okanagan Sunday personally bemoaning Earth’s woeful wanderings.

“I’m a terrified passenger on a runaway planet.” How sad that headline — makes one wonder how many others are aboard.

Taylor imagines he’s riding in a car called Earth, himself and other passengers in the car called Earth are about to go over a cliff, thanks to the driver. This causes Taylor to wonder how many other such fully-loaded Earth cars are being driven so recklessly.

It made me ponder and wholeheartedly agree with Pastor Tim Schroeder’s Focus on Faith column on the same opinion page.

As he concludes, Jesus’s words will endure, along with Jesus’s “two essentials: Love God with your whole heart and love your neighbour as yourself.”

It made this writer conclude that no such Jesus-like love went into and are going into the situational examples cited by Taylor in declaring that “The Earth careens into an unclear future.”

Taylor admits, “Yes, I’m angry. More than that, I’m a terrified passenger, screaming, ‘Stop the world! I want to get off!’ But I can’t. Neither can you.”

Yep, we can empathize with Taylor’s despair over humanity’s and our Earth’s direction after reading Jim Nielsen’s critical note in his Sept. 6 Daily Courier column about a $6-million request to the federal government to care for a pair of giant pandas on loan to the Calgary Zoo.

Such picayune, inhuman nonsense while millions without two nickels to rub together starve worldwide.

Another page reports that a wave of bombings by an lslamic State group killed at least 48 people in and around strongholds of the Syrian government and Kurdish troops. An IS-run news agency said the attacks included six suicide bombings and one remotely-detonated blast.

How starkly different was a report on the Art from the Attic show by artists raising money to for AIDS orphans. All proceeds from the show at the Parkinson Recreation Centre go toward The Stephen Lewis Foundation, which supports African grandmothers caring for orphaned grandchildren in communities hard hit by AIDS.

Such good voluntarism is so starkly opposite to the various examples terrified passenger Taylor unreels from wanting escape from a car careening off the Earth.

As he laments, reeling off example after example, the driver may be Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has been catalyst to a civil war that has generated the greatest flood of refugees since the Second World War.

Or driving may be any one of those “faceless CEOs of massive corporations like Exxon and Goldman Sachs, who are quite content to let the planet crash as long they get their bonuses.”

As Taylor emphasizes, Exxon has apparently known for at least 10 years that fossil fuels were increasing the carbon-dioxide load in the atmosphere beyond acceptable limits. Its own scientists told Exxon so, but Exxon silenced them.

Or could a driver be any one of the Wall Street tycoons who knew their policies risked crashing the monetary system that every country on Earth has bought into? Remember, they did it anyway.

Citing other despairing situational examples, Taylor writes that he “worries my children will have to live in a vastly different world, one for which there are no guidebooks.”

As Taylor forcefully contends,” You can argue forever about causes. But you cannot argue with the known facts.”

For example: Earth warming, year after year; more extreme storms, acidity increases in the oceans, swirling garbage in pools, rampaging tornadoes across the Northwest, ravaging floods in the U.S,, France, and England, and fires turning southern California and northern Canada into charcoal.

Carbon dioxide levels, in the atmosphere, Taylor stresses, have escalated faster over the last 200 years than at any time in the Earth’s previous existence.

Regrettably, as he points out, greater is the number of species that have gone extinct recently than at any time since an asteroid smashed into Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula about 70 million years ago. Tops and bottom of glaciers are melting.

Yep, as Taylor insists, our world is careening “into an unclear future” and “we live in a laboratory run amok.”

And as he so insightfully emphasizes, “Even if we survive, other species that we rely on for food, for recreation, for sheer beauty, will not.”

Instead of blaming each other, he argues guilty corporations, governments and countries must be held accountable for having driven us to cliff’s edge.

Indeed, let’s force the guilty to pay the piper. Amen.

Wally Dennison, Kelowna