Disturbing -- We had recorded on our DVR the series on Showtime titled Years of Living Dangerously about the current state of climate change. Just watched episode one last night and they laid out a complete outline of the problem in Syria: -- it began years ago with the start of the worst drought that the Middle-East has ever seen -- the drought led to problems with the availability of food and water -- lack of food and water created thirst, hunger and eventually abject poverty among many of the Syrian rural community -- these hardships led to pleas for their government to step in and help -- the pleas were ignored by the government -- with no hope left the rebels started a revolution. Now, as Darien and I had discussed, we had never seen this collation of facts presented in such a clear, unambiguous fashion in ANY news media over the last several years. All we (the public) were given were political reasons as to why Syrian rebels were trying to overthrow the government. If the drought, lack of food and water and the rejection of help by the government were mentioned at all, it was by lone voices crying out in the wilderness, as it were. I wonder -- could it be that because the ultimate cause of this drought, which set in motion the series of events leading to the Syrian revolution, was driven by CLIMATE CHANGE that the media powers-that-be decided to obfuscate the situation with talk of Middle-East politics as opposed to the actual reason -- human suffering....? Moreover, it becomes necessary to put this whole thing into perspective in the larger picture of global climate changes that are likely to occur in the next several decades. Do we think that the U.S. will be immune to this problem (see: Plainview, Texas) and that we will not experience areas of our country where food and water supplies will be diminished to the point of human suffering...? What (he asked, rhetorically, already knowing the answer) is our government planning to do about these kinds of possible pending disasters..? How will we, as a country, take care of whatever climate refugees there will be who will have to relocate due to worsening conditions...? What will we do, as a nation, when large swaths of our arable land used to produce the bulk of our food supply can no longer be farmed...? These and other questions will undoubtedly be raised and discussed in the other episodes of this documentary -- but I wonder if there are enough people out there watching to actually absorb the message and begin to take the political action that will be required if we hope to have a world that our children and grandchildren can actually live in...?
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 17:14:49 +0000