Lately I’ve been feeling pretty sorry for Planet Earth. All of our ‘human progress’ has created a chain of events that has really changed the balance of nature and has Mother Nature pretty damned angry. I watched Hurricane Katrina decimate New Orleans. I watched the tsunami kill thousands and thousands in South East Asia. I’ve seen the destruction caused by volcano eruptions across the Pacific. Is something amiss, or am I sensing that our planet is trying to tell us something by creating these natural disasters?
In my ambition to be more informed about what I could do to help end the destruction to our planet, one of the things I did was watch the documentaries ‘Home‘ and ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘ about climate change, pollution and the effects it has on the planets ecosystems. I’ve put a hold on reading popular fiction and taken up reading research on climate change, scouring the internet for articles on the political party’s agenda on climate change and stumbling across the transcript of Hugo Chavez’ speech at the Climate Change Summit at Copenhagen and chuckling to myself because it’s even more poetic the second time around (highly recommended reading).
The Climate Change Verdict
After evaluating what I’d read, watched and learned, I’ve come to the conclusion that although each individual consumer is responsible for the state of the world, much of the blame should fall on big business. In their commitment to making a profit (driven of course by their greed and selfishness) they have caused destruction and atrocities to our planet that are so unforgivable, I can’t believe we have stood back and let it happen.
So then I started digging deeper. Why have these big corporations been allowed to act this way? Because the governments have allowed themselves to be manipulated by no more than an elite bunch of bullies who instead of using their fists to get what they want, they throw their money around instead. It’s not a case of who yells the loudest gets heard. In this day and age, it’s a matter of who has the deepest pockets gets heard. Unfortunately, that just happens to be the mining and resources companies. They have billions of dollars up their sleeves. My guess is that this buys them more “listening time” than you and I.
So then this got me to my next question. If the government won’t stand up to these corporations, than who will? And the answer I came up with is… us. You and me. We’re the only ones who can change the system.
‘But how can we change the system?’ you’re wondering. Well since we elected those schmucks into government, we can always threaten them with our vote. However, that’s a whole other story and I think that, my friends, is a question best left answered in the next instalment of Ramblings of an Eco Warrior Princess.
