By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
We’ve got storms, everywhere we look. We’ve got rain storms, wind storms, and fire storms.* We’ve got flooding and oil leaks and unseasonal temperature extremes. Southern California is a tinderbox, over a hundred thousand homes in jeopardy, while frack-happy Oklahoma has had over 140 earthquakes in these first months of 2014. We’ve got melting ice caps in the arctic (think polar bears) and a disintegrating Antarctic ice sheet (think penguins) with projections of both North American coasts under water by the next century.
We’ve got scientists and activists and even the occasional politico telling us that it’s too late to turn the environment back toward previous lush days of excess, but some, even Al Gore, say it’s not too late to help ourselves. If we will. Which looks like an uphill slog, not so much with the public — much of whom divide into two camps, either frustrated to the point of white-knuckled desperation or simply clueless — as with the politicians who seem determined to help the Koch brothers and their ilk squeeze a last few years of unimpeded profit into their burgeoning offshore accounts.
It’s staggering to think how lethargic some of us are in the face of this emergency, most assuredly to our food supply and lifestyles, but more importantly, to our very species. Those who allow their Judeo-Christian religious preference to influence their common sense would say humans are not just a species, but THE species, given dominion over the earth. Seems to me that a careful reading of scripture would make it clear that even in their own tradition, all that power bestowed in Genesis 1:28 was pre-apple, pre-fall.