Here’s some interesting insights from Mike Biltonen (my darling husband), about the state of the planet we all share. Mike is a passionate fruit farmer and serious about local food security.
I love Earth. I mean I really love this bright blue shiny ball of currently semi-inhabitable soil, water, and air. But it’s going to Hell in a hand-basket faster than I can say Fukushima.
Food. We produce more food for more people than we ever have in the history of, well, time. Yet, we still have starving people all over the globe (including your own backyard) and can’t seem to get them the food they so dearly need to just make it to tomorrow. We commit massive amounts of acreage across the globe to the production of soybeans, corn, and other “commodities” so we can grow animals to feed people cheap hamburgers at McDeath. If we commited this acreage growing vegetables and fruits, we could so easily alleviate global warming and starvation in one fell swoop. Of course, getting the food to the people that are starving would require an act of compassion from the so-called Powers to make sure the food could actually get to where it needs to go. Meanwhile, we’re criminalizing the production of food in our frontyards because gardens can’t be mowed.
Water. There are only a few things that living organisms need in order survive, fresh water is one of them. Yet, we seem to keep shitting in our bed to collect a few scheckles from the, a-hem, Powers that be. Fracking is a global disaster. It is a disaster that is more frightening than pesticide and fertilizer runoff into creeks and rivers; more frightening than the depletion of the once massive aquifers; more frightening than the pollution that occurs in oceans and seas. BP? Fukushima? They’re nothing compared to the companies you’ve never heard of – Apache, Devon, Cabot, Range Resources – that are building the equivalent of many Fukushimas across the face of North America. Thanks goodness that many nations are outlawing fracking. But here in the good old US, money talks and bullshit walks – welcome to the new world order (once, GWB never really knew what he was talking about). Why with all of renewable alternatives we have access to would anyone (and, yes, I am talking to you) allow fracking to even be a topic of conversation today?
Air. You thought we solved air pollution with the Clean Air Act? Well, we got rid of the smog that riddled many of this country’s big cities, that’s for sure. But the real danger lies in what we can’t see. We left fracking above, so let’s just start right back up there. Not only does fracking destroy your water, it’ll destroy the air you breathe too. Again, there’s only so much of that wonderful stuff you suck into your lungs thousands of times each day, why muck it up? But the assault on air quality only starts there, it doesn’t end anywhere soon. If you’ve seen pictures of major Chinese cities you’ve seen the smog that comes from the totally uncontrolled factories there, too. The US was smart; it pushed the manufacturing that casued the great pollution fo the 20th century overseas and now you don’t have to see or breathe it. But it does affect you. And me, for one, I’d rather see what I am breathing than not know. We still have plenty of air pollution in the US and fracking and other non-renewable energy companies are the source of the problem.
And I could go on and on.
The fact is that we’re doing so many things to destroy the planet in ways we’d never imagined. I mean, for starters, can you imagine the lack of response to the Fukushima disaster. I mean JAPAN KILLED THE ENTIRE PACIFIC OCEAN! And yes we’ll find a way out of this disaster too.
The thing that I’ve never been able to understand is why we (i.e., humans) don’t get that the real problem is that there’s too many of us. And I don’t mean Americans. Please believe what you want to believe. But as the world’s human population heads towards 11 billion at the end of this century, we left behind a long time ago the ideal population level. Never mind who’s number you believe. The fact is that the ideal human carrying capacity for the planet was closer to a few million than a few billion. Our species uses more resources than all the other species combined. And we pollute their waters, destroy their air, decimate their habitat, leaving no room or resources for ourselves much less all the other species that depend on this same spinning ball of blue.
I am not sure what it will take for us to realize the errors of our ways. One might’ve thought that we’d figure things out, but, no, we haven’t. Not Hiroshima, not Chernobyl, not Fukushima, not the multitude of smaller eco disasters can set us down a different path. The only true salvation for Earth is going to be disaster that affects us very directly and brings us down to size. Oh we’ll survive, but like the dinosaurs
