South Central Fire Learning Network

As the old Buddhist saying goes, “If you want to know your past, look into your present conditions. If you want to know your future, look into your present actions.”

The wild and constantly variable climate changes of eons of prehistory each tell a story of ice, extinction, and devastation. What naïveté we must posses to dismiss millions of years of history and planetary change. How often we over look the fact that Chicago was under a mile of ice 20,000 years ago -- all this because of natural earth cycles and global warming. So then... why should we care about our current actions?

Do people really think that releasing megatons of CO_{2 (and other more seiously nasty compounds)} is not going to affect the Earth… do they not know? Is anyone truly giving it a 2nd thought? What about our children's health? What do the numbers tell us about the big picture? How do we convince people that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction?

Simply put, even if people grasp the concept of climate change, our contribution to it and the normal warming and cooling trends, how do we inspire and initiate change?

In order to create awareness of the detriment of releasing greenhouse gasses, we must first reach a common understanding over the cyclical nature in which we now take for granted. If only a graph of the entire Quaternary Period – of ocean heights and average planetary temperatures, or new data from the polar core samples which illustrates the unthinkable danger of Rapid Climate Change, to the more modern history of the Industrial Revolution and the resulting increase in CO₂ emissions. Do I even need to address CFC’s? It’s all there, in black and white; one just has to care to look... to open their eyes... to see it all matters.

But soon enough, no one will be able to deny the even more evident reaction of decades of negligence and denial. The time to act is now. The more we hesitate, the deeper and more violent will we plunge into an unthinkable era of ice, death, and despair. It’s happened before, it will happen again. The only question is - will we be prepared? If we don’t initiate massive change now, when the ice age comes in 50, 100, 500 years, will we forever be kicking ourselves for burning all the stores of oil? Only time will tell.

As a species, as a planet and as a nation, we’ve already plunged ourselves into a massively polluted environment of inattentiveness and disrepair. What we do in this county alone affects people all over the world. Our culture, our pollution and our attitude has spread to every corner and almost every culture. Yet who feels the devastation from our consumption - the poor, the underprivileged and the 3rd world - people who consume the least amount of natural resources yet are inadvertently affected the most.

So here’s the deal: We need to change, we need to want to change and we need people to understand why. As Carl Sagan so eloquently put it, “In the United States, as the evidence for the seriousness of global warming mounts, the public will to do something about it seems to be shriveling.” We must make change in our ways, or soon enough, our ways will make us change... I, personally, fear the latter.