Even if there was no climate crisis, our way of life still needs to change.
If we continue clear cutting and burning our great rainforests, we will lose their beauty and biodiversity. Without forests, we would face greater flooding and soil erosion. Thousands of species, many even undiscovered as yet by us humans, will lose their habitats and face extinction. Many plants that could be used to create lifesaving medicines will be destroyed before we even learn their properties. Indigenous peoples will lose their ancestral lands. Their way of life will be under threat, their wisdom lost.
If we continue strip mining the earth for her resources and using toxins in our factories, the air we breathe will continue to be pumped full of toxic pollutants. Air pollution is already killing people all around the globe.
If we continue to demand more and more of those resources to make things we don't need, children and prisoners of war will continue to be forced to work in open pit mines in brutal and dangerous conditions to harvest minerals. Sweatshops will continue to flourish, trapping thousands of people, mainly women, to labour in degrading and unsafe conditions for long hours for paltry pay. The fruits of this labour will continue to be piled high and sold cheap - and we will continue to fast track them to landfill, where they will leach toxic chemicals into our soil and water. What will we do when we have no space left for landfills, no places left to build incinerators to belch out poisonous fumes over our communities?
Our oceans will continue to be choked with plastics. Our marine species will continue to decline, their bellies full of wrappers and cling film mistaken for food leaving them no room for nutrients and condemning them to starvation. Illegal fishing practices will continue to devastate our seas, destroying habitats on the sea bed, reducing populations of fish below sustainable levels and risking their extinction, threatening the livelihood and food security of coastal populations. The salt marshes and mangroves that provide protection from storm surges and flooding from the sea will be lost to human activity such as agriculture and development.
Our sewage will continue to pollute our rivers and oceans. Dyes and other run-off from our factories will continue to be pumped into rivers, killing wildlife, spreading sickness amongst those who need those waters for drinking and bathing.
Pesticides will continue to devastate our insect population, again killing entire species, and those species that depend on them, and so on all the way up the food chain. Our topsoil will become starved of nutrients and unable to produce flourishing crops. We are degrading our soil far faster than it can replenish itself, risking desertification - meaning we would not be able to feed ourselves. Without wild bees and other pollinators, we would lose many plant species around the world, including some of those we rely on for food.
Imagine the world we are heading towards if we don't clean up our act - figuratively and literally. Polluted air; polluted water; food shortages. A world of poverty and misery, tarmac and concrete, the stench of landfills and burning plastics. Pandemics and flooding, slave labour, starvation and homelessness. Loss of bees, whales, dolphins, butterflies, birds, and millions more.
Climate change sceptics argue that there is no climate emergency, that we can continue on this course of endless profit and eternal growth. Even if that were true, look at what it would cost.
The profit motive will kill us all.
ReplyDeleteAgreed!
DeleteSo true - we need to make changes! I truly think that by us all making a few small changes it adds up to a big difference, but sometimes I feel I'm not doing enough. I know fashion is such a polluting industry so I'm changing the way I shop (more second hand shopping) and trying to promote rewearing more on my blog with the 30 ways series. I want my boys to have a safe climate and environment to grow up in, bushfire season seems to be getting more deadly and closer and closer to home.
ReplyDeleteOn a lighter note, hope that your week is going well and you have a nice weekend planned ahead :)
Away From The Blue
I totally agree with you, sometimes I get overwhelmed just thinking about all the different things I could - should - be doing, and I have to remind myself I can't fix everything myself! Small steps are hugely better than none. I'm so glad that rewearing is becoming less stigmatized too! (I really like Aja Barber's work around rewearing, shopping secondhand and consuming less.)
DeleteBushfire season sounds utterly terrifying. As Tassie says below, it amazes me that people can still deny that climate change is a real thing when so many are already living with its effects.
Thank you, I hope you're having a great week :)
So much of a mess, I do worry that we will only make it worse at the rate we’re going. It’s odd that there are so many sceptics when the evidence is facing us
ReplyDeleteYes, COP26 was the embarrassing farce that many environmental groups had anticipated, I really do not understand what our so called 'world leaders' can be thinking. Some young people with families in the global South are actually suing the UK government for inaction and financing their destruction - good luck to them.
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