Global Warming: How the Environmental Movement Has Botched It!

This is my “take” on the environmental movement and its emphasis on “Global Warming”. To me that approach is self-defeating.

I read a lot of things that touch on environmentalism but are not so labeled. I follow the news carefully but greatly miss my weekly Time and Newsweek which helped give me perspective. Nevertheless, I average approximately two hours of news per day and another hour or two of reading. These are my pleasures, so somehow I fit them in.

I believe the environmental movement has “blown it”, and I wonder who decided to focus so much on global warming. In retrospect, I believe it is the wrong approach.

Jane Goodall, Jacques Causteau,  David Quammem in his great classic on speciation, “The Song of the Dodo,  Rachel Carson in “Silent Spring”, Richard Attenborough in “Planet Earth”, the Disney documentaries and movies, Harari’s “Sapiens”,and so many other sources have revealed the great destruction of the species of the world,  of the great forests and rivers, and the huge explosion of resource-consuming human beings and their domesticated animals whose combined weight equals 75% of all living creatures. Poisons and processed sugary foods are killing us slowly, but by the millions. Tribalism and “political famines” cause mass human misery.

This “human pestilence” has absorbed the resources of the world, spewing out pollution,  and putting toxic poisons in everything we breathe and drink,

The story of the poisoning of our planet and depletion of our resources is a powerful one, and relatively easy to prove by the scientific method. But, instead of focusing on the things people can see and feel,  the environmentalists decided to  hitch their wagon to “global warming”.

Yes, it is a concern that Upshur County, W.V. might become as hot as Fort Mill S.C.  in the summer, and that our native animals may have to move north, and that we may get our share of fire ants and other southern critters.

There is no doubt the heating of the earth is terribly serious, the rising of the oceans, the shrinking of our glaciers, and the unforeseen consequences. But it seems to be hard for people to wrap their head around.

However, the number of species in the world is countable; the amount of poison in the air is measurable; the history of failed civilizations such as the Maya and Easter Island is available to us, and there is so much that science can reveal right here, in our immediate present and future, to help galvanize America and humankind to action.

Instead, the environmental movement gives the polluters and the conservative right a tool to continue deny the truth in order to protect their short-term profits and line their pockets with gold. Donald Trump can say that global warming is a conspiracy developed to benefit the Chinese, and people will vote for him in droves. He can campaign and tell people not to worry, that  it is all a hoax and that he will bring coal jobs back, and even traditional conservatives will back him, from perceived self interest, and because “Global Warning” is so darn hard to prove.

If “they put me in charge”, we would immediately change to:

1.  We are being poisoned;

2. We are pushing other living creatures to the fringes, creatures who are the source of the wonder in our world and are potential resources that are incalculable for our well-being.

3. That there are things we can do to slow and stop the great extinction of species.

4.  We are allowing the sun to come through our atmosphere and cause cancer in us and our children, and if we don’t do something about it, civilization could fall apart.

5. I would focus on the poisoning and then move to the symptoms. Al Gore spoke of treating our atmosphere as a place to dump raw sewage. Now that’s an analogy people can picture.

6.  I would move the fact that the earth is getting warmer to a secondary position, as a symptom and not the cause, but one that can eventually tip the scales towards putting us out of business!

7. I would stress the need for space science! Yep; with all our eggs in one basket, our species is a fragile as a flower; spread to other planets and even solar systems gives us a fighting chance to become what we are capable of evolving to.

8. That’s just me, but we all get to put in our “two cents”.

This post was written by Burton Hunter