Earth Day is tomorrow, and every doomed climate has a silver lining.
We’re not breaking records anymore; we’re breaking the planet. In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They’ll just ask, “So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?”
Here’s the good news: We’ll at least be able to say we fought.
After decades of scant organized response to climate change, a powerful movement is quickly emerging around the country and around the world, building on the work of scattered front-line organizers who’ve been fighting the fossil-fuel industry for decades. It has no great charismatic leader and no central organization; it battles on a thousand fronts. But taken together, it’s now big enough to matter, and it’s growing fast.
In an accompanying piece in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, the face of “the new green revolution– from college students to reverends to high-finance investors” comes into focus. From green activists like Maria Gunnoe and Rev. Lennox Yearwood who are shutting shit down and “throwing their bodies on the gears of the machine” if need be, to retired billionaires funding the green-friendly redevelopment of America. Even the Sierra Club is now taking more direct means under the executive leadership of Michael Brune– who “zip-tied himself to the White House gates– the first sanctioned, illegal, act of civil disobedience in the Sierra Club’s history.”
This coming Earth Day, I think it’s important to remember that there are a lot of really good people in the trenches fighting the good fight, and with the U.S. military transitioning away from fossil fuels, as well as insurance companies seeing the cost benefit of not having to pay out hundreds of billions in claims when Florida is swallowed up, it’s as though it won’t be one giant meteorite that wipes out the fossil fuel dinosaurs, but thousands.
I’m just getting tired of having to observe starving fucking polar bears that are floating out to sea on a broken piece of ice because “oh no, throwing them a goddamn salmon head would be interfering with nature, and balance, and the food chain, and corporate fucking profits(just like welfare for the poor)!” Meanwhile, it’s as though we just keep shoving a hundred billion bearded seals and Beluga whales down the throats of the fossil fuel industry every day.
That’s the imbalance of nature.