What do you say about this fellow – practicing to be a Jesuit priest. Yale Law School. His family involved in California politics since the 1930s. His great-grandfather here from Germany for the great California Gold Rush, 1852.
Yes, that genocidal, land-thieving time of California’s history –
Surkh Gul with her daughter.
“My family’s water well has dried up,” 18-year-old Surkh Gul said.
“Ours too,” echoed 13-year-old Inaam.
A distressed Surkh Gul lamented: “We have to fetch water from the public well along the main road, but that water is muddy, not fit for drinking. I get bottled water for my two-year-old daughter. At least someone in the family should stay healthy.”
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 10: Protesters march during a demonstration against the Dakota Access Pipeline on March 10, 2017 in Washington, DC. Thousands of protesters and members of Native nations marched in Washington DC to oppose the construction of the proposed 1,172 Dakota Access Pipeline that runs within a half-mile of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Was undeclared. Exactly where and when it began is debatable. Most would say there had been low-level conflict for millennia, but it only became a world war toward the end of the 20th century CE. Some choose the symbolic date when we ran that tanker, the Exxon Valdez, aground in Prince William Sound, because its cargo was the secret weapon that had brought the war into this new stage.
It is crystal clear—unlike the smoky skies where I live–to most of us who are willing to consider the facts: this summer’s ‘natural’ disasters have been seeded anthropogenically. Wildfires in the northwestern United States and Canada, in Greenland, and in Europe are often referred to in the media as ‘unprecedented’ in size and fury. Hurricanes and monsoons, with their attendant floods and destruction, are routinely described as having a multitude of ‘record-breaking’ attributes.
Run to the trees
Trees will be burning
Run to the sea
Sea will boiling
All on that day
Mother Earth has experienced five extinction events, but she’s still standing.
Like a prizefighter, she is the Milky Way Galaxy Grand Champion.
Our tenacious planet is armed to fight and conquer global warming without fancy gadgets or special geo-engineering techniques. She can do it on her own, having proven herself time and again, restoring one extinction event after another, and the rest.
We only have to give her a chance, some elbow room to strut her stuff.
A bottom-up approach to biodiversity that takes into account the values of local people is helping to protect hundreds of plant and animal species in Ethiopia
