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All the starry heavens

September 26, 2024   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Do we believe in heaven?

I still hope humans will someday detect an “anomaly” in space by one of their probes, their explorer crafts – in any way, but seeing it for sure: a translucent “curtain,” definitely – or maybe not! Visions of movement on the other “side” what-was-that? Beings that can never be reached, never known and never circumvented, definitely not destroyed. Every effort to probe, communicate, conquer defeated.

My mother used to say we should not worry about heaven or hell after death but acknowledge they are already here. How we deal with life and others will dictate, to some extent, where we are. Look around and see if she wasn’t telling the truth.

So now it is the Seniors of our communities who are going to carry signs and sing out “Later is too late,” as their campaign slogan declares against the continued suicidal attack on the planet. In the case of Seniors, though, there is a history with pollution and the incremental harm to this water, land, and air. 

As far back as the 1950s, oil company executives knew how much harm they were doing by extracting and shipping oil, but somehow the wealth that oil was producing gave them permission to do the harm, to hide the harm, and bring our environment to its proverbial knees.

The list of changes to our weather is very long, beginning with this being the hottest September in history, killing off essential ecosystems like coral reefs, destroying forests which are the most important life support in the world: destroy the forests and we extinguish our breathable air.

Simple as that.

This cannot be a mystery nor a surprise. Where we are now is as predicted, warned, and scientists have been repeating this very situation for decades. Yet, we are reckless teenagers, it seems, determined to drive our Dad’s shiny new car over a cliff because he wouldn’t give us permission to drive it. Oops, we forgot the other side of the revenge and are hurtling over the cliff with it.

Ah, but we are crafty and inventive and we have systems to stem the tide. Am I referring to solar panels on every new house made in such frenzies these days? Trees being planted by the hundreds and thousands in every available spot a bit late, too, because trees need many years to grow.

Too bad we are so busy depleting the boreal forest in our North by the NHL hockey rink (funny but that’s how they count the land being cleared).

Referring to the boreal forest, the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) tells us, “Each year, industrial logging operations clearcut approximately one million acres of intact forest, equivalent to five NHL hockey rink–size areas every minute. This logging also leaves scars so severe that trees planted to reforest the land need decades longer to grow.”

All this harm for toilet paper and kitchen roll shipped primarily to the States.

Where was I – ah, yes crafty and inventive – with small windmills that are suitable for single buildings or useful for a collection of residents?

No, but we are forever playing with the notion – ready to go in some cases. I fear – of geoengineering, a small collection of methods for reflecting the sun back into space, with millions of reflective gas particles, in one idea, thus reducing fractionally the heat of the sun. There are others.

This is crazier than one image until one reads the possible and even probable consequences on this link:

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2023-3-fall/stress-test/solar-geoengineering-could-wreak-havoc-planet https://

Once again, we want to party ’til we drop but we don’t want to clean up the mess. Or we will someday, when we get around to it; when Mother Earth has warned and nagged as much as she can until the wreckage is truly out of control. Naturally, we are whining and blaming but we are still allowing our governments to subsidize and protect with tax privileges the wildly wealthy corporations still doing business as usual.

The Seniors of the land are coming. They may realize their lives enjoyed the riches one way or another, the conveniences of simply not doing better when the edge of truth began to make things clear.

Like any really big, huge, responsible move, the end to using fossil fuels is just a matter of will. Most of what is needed to convert away from fossil fuels, logging old and essential forests, treating our agriculture like a laboratory by growing by chemistry has been invented or imagined well enough to be another tool. 

Money is not the issue except for the grip it holds on the minds and hearts of those who tremble they might have less. Take all the money being poured into what is harmful and divert it without exception to alternatives, with all speed and now – and there may be something left for our children’s children.

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