This is not a drill. We are in a state of emergency. One million plant and animal species face imminent extinction. We might have only 11 years left to cut our carbon emissions in half in order to avert climate breakdown. By putting in place laws to protect Wildlife, trees, air, water and Mother Earth we will be able to protect her. Without these laws corporations and governments will continue putting profits ahead of PROPER STEWARDSHIP & PROPER PROTECTIONS.
Around the world elected leaders play politics with the most basic elements of human survival clean air and water, healthy ecosystems, and a safe climate. They have fallen short of exhibiting moral leadership and political determination required to protect the survival of our planet. Mother earth’s ecosystems are not separate, they are woven together by flows of energy, water, nutrients, and air into one fabric, which links all living things. .
An example of major harm to mother earth was on November 01, 1986, a major spill from a pesticide plant turned the Rhine river into a "dead river" the entire length of Germany. Sandoz chemical spill was a major environmental disaster caused by a fire and its subsequent extinguishing at Sandoz agro-chemical storehouse in the Schweizerhalle industrial complex, Basel-Landschaft, Switzerland. It released toxic agro-chemicals into the air and resulted in tons of pollutants entering the Rhine river, turning it red. The chemicals caused a massive mortality of wildlife downstream, killing among other things a large proportion of the European eel population in the Rhine.That’s just one of hundreds of human-generated assaults upon the environment. Acid rain falls on Scandinavia. Oil spills destroy the coral reefs of the Red Sea. Air pollution kills vegetation in the Los Angeles basin. Radioactive waste dumped into the Irish Sea can be traced up to the Arctic Circle and over to Denmark.
To help us understand better the impact, an assemblage of field ecologists got together in Woods Hole on Cape Cod in 1986 to study all the creatures that live in a lake or a forest, what eats what, how the beautiful, intricate machinery of nature fits together. Each of them is an expert on the Arctic or the peat bog or the prairie. Together they form a community of monitors, documenting what is happening to the living systems of the earth. Here is some of what they documented. Lichens are like the canaries that warned miners of bad air quality. An undisturbed lichen can live for hundreds of years, but in polluted air it dies. Parts of England have already lost 89% of their lichens. Southern California has lost 50%. The “lichen desert” around the city of Zurich has increased in area by a factor of 9 since 1936.
Satellite photos of Amazonian Brazil show the expanding grid pattern of settlers’ clearings. The pastures that replace the forests erode so rapidly that after 12 years their productivity drops by half. No forest can grow there again.
As the western United States is overgrazed, the native bunchgrasses decline, and foreign cheatgrass moves in. Cheatgrass, unlike bunchgrass, dries in summer, which makes it poor for grazing and a fire hazard. The fires destroy juniper and pine forests on the uplands, opening more room for cheatgrass. Thousands of square miles of the West have been converted from bunchgrass, sagebrush, pine, deer, and elk to cheatgrass, cheatgrass, and cheatgrass.
Most damaged ecosystems are not lifeless. But the life forms are changed and simplified. Sedges, grasses and insects are survivors. Trees, mammals, and birds are not.
These changes are irreversible. The 100-mile swath of devastation downwind from the International Nickel refinery in Sudbury, Ontario, has not recovered, though pollution emissions dropped by a factor of five after 1972. On the fringe of the damage zone red maple roots are sending up shoots again, but the shoots do not survive. In some places so much vegetation has been lost that the soil has washed away. Once there were farms and forests; now there is nothing but bare rock.
A lake in Canada was deliberately acidified to study the effects of acid rain. As the pH went down, species after species disappeared. When the lake was restored to normal, many did not return. An acid-resistant stickleback that had never been seen in the lake took the place of the fathead minnow. The lake trout, which had nearly starved, grew fat again but did not breed.
Environmental destruction is usually justified by economic arguments. But Robert Repetto of the World Resources Institute challenges those arguments. For example, the companies clearing the Amazon forests are realizing about 250% on their investment, which explains very neatly why they are there. But the Brazilian government is subsidizing the logging through road-building, tax-reduction, and other incentives. Counting the whole cost, including that to Brazilian taxpayers, the enterprise is losing 55% per year!
From Tundra to Rain Forest to Ocean depths there is large scale degradation. Mother earth cannot sustain these human activities, such as fossil-fuel burning. Fossil fuel burning is so pervasive that it is changing our atmosphere and our climate. This damage is not only local, but global.
Then we take a look at what is happening to wildlife. All over the world, animals are suffering needlessly in the billions and it’s only getting worse. Hundreds of thousands of wild animals around the world are taken away from their natural habitats and forced into captivity and subjected to abuse, both mentally and physically, so we can consume or be entertained. This must end!!!!.
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