We Stand Alone Between Earth and Sky and Walk Together – BUDDHA
The recent international Children’s Walk Out and Climate March highlighted the disastrous climate we are bequeathing to our children, grandchildren and their children. By fouling the air, water and earth, we are contaminating the very planet that sustains us. There is no planet B and no way to get there. This is it; our Home.
The Ogallala Aquifer (one of 30 in the U.S.) is so contaminated with PFAS that a major dairy farmer in Clovis, New Mexico, was forced to destroy his 4000-cow herd. PFAS are a combination of about 3-5000 chemicals that have been made since 1950. Cannon Air Force Base outside Clovis poured its PFAS chemicals onto the ground for decades and it leached into the water. This aquifer is the source of water for people in eight states serving 2.3 million people.
While we struggle to keep our drinking water clean, Trump is appointing CEOs and top echelon of the Petro-Chemical Industry to governmental positions. They are laughing and glad-handing one another as they deregulate their industries. They’re making money at the expense of all that makes our planet habitable.
The dinosaur of energy, coal, creates enormous sludge ponds that are now more liable to burst and pollute our rivers and streams. In 2013, a coal ash pond ruptured and 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash cascaded into nearby rivers and smothered about 300 acres of land. Since then, nothing has changed except the climate.
Our nuclear power plants sit on the banks of rivers to keep radioactive material cool; today, Nebraska’s nuclear plant is underwater. Raging river water has destroyed the earthen dam upriver and employees are sandbagging the plant 24 hours a day to keep the generators running. A Fukushima-like meltdown could happen in Nebraska if flood waters shut down the generators that cool the radioactive material.
Climate change is here. Our very lives depend on working together to change the current paradigm; we can solve many problems by living more harmoniously with the earth and our fellow creatures. Let’s do it.