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.

What Parents Won't Acknowledge About the Climate Crisis is Going to Kill Their Children

I went seakayaking with a great group of students recently. It was a lovely west coast (of Canada) almost-summer afternoon ... sunny but not too hot. We spent the morning learning how to handle the boats and exploring the intertidal life along the shore.

We stopped for a lovely picnic lunch on a beach. Afterwards, I managed to fall in the water getting back into my kayak. (It's a habit I have ... I figure if I fall in, nobody else will have to. And it made for some comic relief.)

On the way back, the group was more focused on technique and speed, but I had a few moments of calm to talk with the leader of our outing as we floated under the bridge with the current. 

A seagull passed by us. "The whitest thing in the world," I proclaimed, "is a seagull's breast." The leader laughed and agreed. Then I said, simply to carry on the conversation, "Seagulls and other seabirds are in huge decline [see page 6 Seabirds Going the Way of the Dodo?]. Have you noticed that?"

"No ... do they know why?" she asked. I managed to get one or two reasons out (mainly, a decrease in their food sources) before she said, "I can't hear that stuff. I've got two young kids and it makes me too sad." 

Even on a gorgeous day with the wind at our backs in self-powered (i.e., zero-carbon) conveyances, still we can't face it. If we can't face it when our own circumstances are good, does that mean we're really going to wait until the local %$#@ hits the fan before we even acknowledge the impending implosion of global ecosystems?

If people who have wonderful little bundles of reasons to take action aren't taking action, truly, where's the hope in that? People want hope, but they won't pay the price for it. And the price is feeling the sadness of what's going to happen if we don't feel the sadness and let it motivate us to speak up on behalf of the children we love so dearly. 

Speak up. That's all I'm asking. Or even just listen. Hear. Open your ears and eyes. Open your hearts. Be willing to feel the pain, to lament the losses that have already led to precipitous declines in seabird populations. 

That same fate (environmental and ecological changes caused by climate change; pollution and habitat destruction diminishing the biodiversity upon which we depend) awaits our children if ... but you don't want to hear it.