Children ... Our Vulnerable Little Ones

Twin tornadoes ripped through Canada's capital region on Friday night. In a country blessed with strong infrastructure (due to our winters and our wealth as a nation), nearly 300 properties were damaged or destroyed. Several people were injured but no fatalities have been reported, thank goodness, though hundreds have been displaced and some have lost everything. The stories of complete strangers opening their doors to those left without power or without a home at all have been heartwarming.

However, one harrowing sound bite of a father who nearly lost his daughter left me sobbing ... it is so metaphorical of what is already happening in other parts of the world, but what is only just beginning in this privileged region. Our children — our most beloved and yet our most vulnerable — are being hit first and worst by the ravages of climate disruption.

Listen in here as this distraught father describes what he experienced as he struggled to hold on to his daughter during the tornado. 

Folks, we are ALL struggling to hold on to our children now. Tomorrow, it might be the children of the wonderful fellow trying to comfort his friend. But we need to acknowledge that parents all around the world are not able to protect and save their children who are being lost in storms and mudslides and floods, or because of droughts and famines and contaminated drinking water. This one man's raw emotion is, for me, a metaphor for the pain and agony that all parents go through when they lose a child, or even just come close to it.

This morning, I received the latest piece from a wonderful friend and climate change activist, Dr. Reese Halter. Fossil Fuels Poisoning Children explains why we need to get to zero combustion and zero carbon emissions, even without climate change in the picture. The statistics in this article are horrifying. Half of the 4.4 million schoolchildren in New Delhi, India have permanently stunted lung development from breathing fossil fuel pollution. What are we doing to our children?

"Man has poisoned our children and the entire planet with fossil fuels. Now we must all fight for our survival."

One commenter wrote: "In a world that has been created for all, it is a tragic reflection on humanity that our children are being born already poisoned by our own hand. No accident of nature but the hand of man's own greed." 
Reese responds: "We are ALL one. And it's high time that we understand the severity of this crisis...."

Which brings me to the last thing I want to share this week (besides a link to a 2017 post I wrote called What Parents Won't Acknowledge About the Climate Crisis Is Going to Kill Their Children). It's a video in which two scientists talk about the "perfectly normal and natural" reactions that people have when they first truly grasp the urgency of this crisis. 

While watching it, I noticed two things. At about 7:30, one of the scientists shows that she hasn't yet grasped how bad (and not neat) things are going to become. You can hear the denial set in when she talks about her own child. The other thing I noticed is that feeling this range of la-la-I-don't-want-to-hear-this emotions is a developed-world privileged luxury. As I pointed out above, many parents have already experienced devastating loss — they can't deny that this is happening.

A Fun Way to Spend a Weekend (Talking about Climate Change)

We have a wonderful house guest here this weekend, and oh, what fun we're having. If you can call yakking about climate change till all hours of the day and night "fun"! ;-)

Our guest is Earth Doctor Reese Halter, one of the most dedicated environmental activists we've ever met. We're doing some filming at different sites around our island community to help support his Save Nature Now: Bees, Trees and Seas campaign to mobilize the Millennials and TBDs (apparently the younger generation doesn't have a name yet). 

We've filmed on the beach and on the bluff, at a garden and in a forest, and at a marina with orca whales in the backdrop.

Dr. Halter, who considers himself a specialist in Earth's life support systems, is a hero in our eyes. He has dedicated his whole life to helping people around the world wake up to what we're doing to the biosphere. Nature is collapsing all around us. Climate instability is impacting every region on Earth. 

Reese does TV interviews, radio shows and daily podcasts. He attends protests and demonstrations. He teaches and lectures. He speaks on behalf of the orcas, the bees and the trees -- and man, does he ever know his stuff! He fights poachers and plastics. His "clients" are Nature and all the animals (including the human ones). 

What Reese wants to do is let young people know that there are some wonderful technological solutions in store. But they have to get to work guarding the oceans and forests, and saying no to oil, gas, coal, fracking and pipelines. The science is irrefutably precise. But there's no time to lose. We've run out of time. Our planet's ecosystems -- the oceans and forests that support us -- are under siege. 

Reese is going to confirm for young people something they've perhaps been inarticulately feeling -- that they're enslaved by fossil fuels corporations and the big banks. They (indeed, we) are no longer free. To win back their freedom, they'll have to join the fight to Save Nature Now!

Earth Doctor Reese Halter is someone who exemplifies that old adage by Chief Dan George:

If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys.

Then with his outgoing and enthusiastic nature, Reese combines the Chief Dan George quote with this more positive outlook of Senegalese forestry engineer, Baba Dioum:

In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

I hope you'll spend some time learning about Reese Halter and letting him teach you. For the sake of the children's love for all animals, of all species, and for all the collapsing ecosystems ... the bees, the trees and the seas.