Yes It Is, It’s True: We’re going there in a handbasket

It wasn’t just because Earth Day (April 22) was approaching that I watched the excellent PBS documentary about Rachel Carson, author of the ground-breaking “Silent Spring.”

It was because I have long been fascinated by the brainy woman who was the unlikely heroine of the birth of the environmental movement. Her landmark book was published 55 years ago, and love it or hate it, “Silent Spring” has had a major impact on America’s policy and attitudes about the natural world.

I couldn’t help being depressed about the conclusion that despite the strides we’ve made in more than half a century, we’re seeing an alarming slide back to destruction, based on greed and comfort.

Carson was dying of cancer when she wrote “Silent Spring” and I wondered just how she could be taken so seriously afterward.

Carson was one of the first to outline the dangers of insecticides such as DDT, maintaining they caused massive health problems to humans and disrupted the balance of nature. Of course the agriculture and pesticide industries fought back with a vengeance in their quest to grow more food for greater profits and rid the world of pests such as mosquitoes.

During World War II, DDT was proven effective in depleting the mosquito numbers in the jungles of the Philippines, helping American GIs in their fight.

But Carson argued humans pay a price and submitted that if mosquitoes are extinct, frogs won’t be able to eat. She suggested a delicate and complicated natural balance that served all of us in the long run.

It wasn’t until the late 1960s that I became of aware of the growing environmental movement. To this day, I don’t consider myself much of a tree hugger, but my son, Robby, who teaches physics and earth science in Colorado Springs, showed me how wetlands are indeed the lifeblood of life on this planet.

Throughout my awareness of a fragile planet Earth, I have come to the conclusion that America’s continued love affair with fossil fuels, greed and quest for comforts afforded us by dirty energy and technology have ruled for far too long. Even the 3% of scientists who pooh-pooh the other 97& who warn about climate change are somehow tied to fossil fuels as spokesperson hired guns whose jobs are to sow the seeds of doubt in the advertising, public relations and marketing arenas. It’s like watching the tobacco industry all over again.

After examining as much evidence as I can as a non-scientist, I’ve noticed that virtually all predictions 15 and 20 years ago about weird and violent weather are coming true. Tune in to the nightly news programs and you’ll see an alarming steady drumbeat of stories about droughts in the West, snow in Cairo, islands nearly disappearing under the ocean and violent storms local old-timers say they’ve never seen before. Yet rarely, if ever, do networks mention the possibility of man-made climate change as the culprit.

I agree with Sen. Bernie Sanders, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye the Science Guy and 97% of scientists that our greatest challenge as human beings is not terrorism, war, racism or pestilence. It’s climate change, which is connected to all of the above.

My greatest fear is that in our complacence and greed we will not do anything about the problem until it is too late. The rise of know-nothing politicians, foolish love of money, comfort in continuing our addiction to oil and coal all represent suicidal behavior.

As deGrasse-Tyson recently said, the anti-intellectual, emotional and religious denial of the most serious problem to face mankind we lead us to ruin. Planet Earth will survive nicely, thank you. But human beings will be wiped from the globe, and it’s possible there may be no evidence we ever existed hundreds of years from now.

I once saw a bumper sticker that said, “If you don’t believe in God, you’d better be right.” My amendment would be, “If you don’t believe in climate change, you’d better be right.”