I have always been intrigued with this place we call our earth. You see there is no other place like it known to man and believe me they have been looking. You think about all of the balances and safe guards this planet came with, that make living here possible and it is mind-boggling. The ozone layer that protects us from the suns ultraviolet rays that would cook us otherwise. The magnetic field that originates in the earth’s core that shields us from deadly space radiation. How the earth is tipped on its axis that gives us the seasons of the year and how it rotates to give us the hours of the day. How it moves in perfect cinch with the sun and the moon just far enough away to keep us from roasting and yet close enough to keep from freezing. How the plants and trees absorb the poison gases we give off and give us back life sustaining oxygen and to think it’s gone on for millions of years.
Then came man and in his infinite wisdom, he was able to find heavy metals and fossil fuels and start an industrial revolution by inventing electrical power and gasoline powered engines. Smelting ores into different metals and inventing plastics from petroleum and glass from sand. There was refrigeration to cool our homes and preserve our food and natural gas to heat our homes. Often with some side effects for this planet we didn’t fully understand and probably don’t understand yet. We invented miracle drugs to cure illnesses and chemicals to control everything from weeds to insects and yet we still didn’t understand what it was doing to our earth and probably don’t fully understand it today either but we use them anyway.
Then we blew a hole in the ozone layer with chlorofluocarbons and had to find a repair for it and it looks like we might have. But then came more problems with no easy fixes like that. Wells are pumping poisoned drinking water from chemicals and drugs we excreted and rivers, fed by runoff that flows into the gulf have created a gulf dead zone hundreds of square miles where nothing lives. Smog and air quality problems are sickening many and changing, weather patterns. There are fixes for much of this but they run up against the greed that exists from those who benefit from selling those products that are causing all of the problems. They hire legions of lawyers and buy off politicians while admitting no fault, even in the face of over mounting evidence. They know they are wrong, they just don’t care and they are going to milk this cow for all its worth and in the meantime the beat goes on.
The earth is becoming a ticking clock and we can stop and rewind it or let it run down. To those younger people who will inherit this mess, the day will come when you will curse the generations who lied and cheated and looked the other way, all in an effort to make a buck with no self-guilt for ruining this earth for the ages, when there were answers for all of those problems if you only looked for them-- there was no money in those answers however for the guilty people who were involved in the sickening of the earth so they rejected them. Someday when man is gone the earth will again heal itself and soon there will be no trace left of the people who inherited this great blue planet and elected to destroy it, instead of taking care of it. No one wants to write like this but the truth needs to be told.
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