Seeds Of Change

Two recent items in the media caught my attention. One of them dealt with Norway’s completion of a vault to store seeds. The vault is located in a frozen mountain just off the coast of this beautiful Nordic country. The crypt has been labeled The Doomsday Vault. The reasoning behind the plan is that when mankind reaches it’s final conclusion at least whoever is left will have something to plant and thus eat. (note: please read my poem, Something Special in my archives) It’s a shame that things have come to this. But we don’t really need for this scenario to play out, to wait for the end to come. By knitting together we can form a defense against the looming global environmental catastrophe. Many people around the globe are taking action by shrinking their lifestyle to a more local level. They realize that they can’t control the global governments but they can have some say on what occurs locally. Vegetable gardening, solar heating, recycling are becoming the norm in lots of cities. The environmental community has been preaching all along this dictum: Think globally, act locally. It’s finally starting to sink in. Here in our little community of Kalamazoo, lying almost exactly between the metropolises of Chicago to the west and Detroit to the east, things are gradually changing. Most of our buses in town now run of waste oil. All Kalamazoo students are assured of a free in-state college education when they graduate. Maybe they will develop a way to harness the power of lightning or some other valuable invention. Our local farmer’s market is thriving. Green articles in our local newspaper are now common. Much more needs to be done, but at least it is a start. Other communities around the world are beginning to become more aware of their responsibility for being caretakers of the earth, and not dominators. We have no right to declare that we have dominion over this earth because eventually we will leave this earth the way we entered, with nothing. We don’t own a damn thing.
The second item affirmed something I knew all along. My contention has always been that we are all connected. Human beings and everything else in the cosmos are inter-connected. From my many years working in the weather field, I came to realize this basic fact: If you tweak one portion of the web of life, all other portions move with it. You can never act wholly independent of anything else. Weather scientists have postulated the theory that a butterfly flapping its wings in, say, Butte, Montana can effectively cause a tornado in Topeka, Kansas. Interdependancy is absolute. With that knowledge in mind I wasn’t surprised when I read an article dealing with the movement of global dust. Here in America we receive pollutants, such as mercury, from China’s industrial expansion. The dust from China and other Asian countries rise into the atmosphere and troposphere and float around the globe, eventually landing on terrain that is far removed from its source. The dust usually contain bacteria, viruses, pollens, fungi spores, dried animal feces, chemicals, and pesticide residues. We here in America have been dumping our pollutants on the rest of the world’s population and now it is coming full circle. Officials in Los Angeles state that as much as one-third of their smog comes from Asia. In the first part of the twentieth century, on the average, China suffered a dust storm once every ten years. Each year the storms have increased in number. Now the citizens of China suffer ten dust storms each year. Most last for many days. It's gotten so bad that Beijing, the capitol, is expected to be covered in dust within ten years
Bottom line: There is always a repercussion for any action, no matter the source.