the smoke has followed us to Ft. St. James…we are running out of places to run to.
“Hell is truth seen too late –
duty neglected in its season”
Tryon Edwards
(American Theologian, 1809-1894)
I read a post on facebook that I thought was a little weird…it was about all the smoke from the forest fires…”I refuse to let this continue to get to me. Yes the fires are close, but I have my family and friends, and that is what matters!”
Hmmm well I guess when we are in a state of distress and feeling overwhelmed and afraid and miserable and sick it is nice to have the comfort of friends and family around us…but holy cow! Maybe some things we should be saying this is total crap…my throat is like sandpaper, my eyes are burning, it hurts to breathe, I am stuck in the house on lock down and live on the fringe of the area where an evacuation alert has been issued…thank god my friends and family aren’t having to live with this!
The fire is 10 KM away the Hospital is on lockdown because the automatic doors with all the coming and going of visitors are causing the smoke alarms to go off. So only emergencies that have been scheduled and employees are allowed in. And the smoke doesn’t seem to be letting up…rather more fires are igniting everywhere and the called for rain must have gone to Pakistan causing even more trouble for them and us!…now the smoke has drifted over the Rocky Mountains into Alberta, the Prairies and into Toronto! Maybe it will reach Ottawa and all those Conservatives that have their head in the oil sands will wake up and smell the smoke and finally get it…climate change and our actions that are the driving force are causing mayhem world wide!
And just who knows when this whole ball of wax will be over? BC has a whole Province full of dead trees that are just waiting for the spark. Even the healthy forests are parched. There has been some talk that wrapping up these fires will take until the snow flies…
So yes I am miserable and I want all those naysayers of Climate Change to get a taste of what we have been living with for almost a month. I want them to smell the smoke on their clothes and hair, I want them to watch the ash fall from the sky like snow in the summer, I want them to live with no light so the street lights are on in the daytime, I want them to feel crappy all over because of the toxicity that permeates to all their life force. Maybe when they experience just the fall out of a crisis they will see that even if life and property have been spared…other ramifications like lack of tourism dollars, increased health costs or maybe just having the loss of quality of life for a time is too much of a premium to pay for the self centered greedy ways of uber capitalism.
Take the Kyoto Protocol. Destruction of the environment is not only rational; it’s exactly what you’re taught to do in college. If you take an economics or a political science course, you’re taught that humans are supposed to be rational wealth accumulators, each acting as an individual to maximize his own wealth in the market. The market is regarded as democratic because everybody has a vote. Of course, some have more votes than others because your votes depend on the number of dollars you have, but everybody participates and therefore it’s called democratic. Well, suppose that we believe what we are taught. It follows that if there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren, and they don’t have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren’s interests is being irrational, because what you’re supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy. If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational.
Noam Chomsky
