A call for action against Bush's assault on nature.
“There is something terribly wrong with the ocean”, says an Oregon marine scientist. He was referring to the deaths of hundreds and perhaps thousands of the Common Murre, a sea bird that has thrived for thousands of years along the craggy Oregon coast. Recently these bird have been found in piles along the pristine beaches of this state. Their deaths are caused by starvation. Starvation because the ocean water is much warmer than normal and is not producing the food resources that these birds need to live. Not only is starvation threatening their very existence, but also an abysmally small number of new chicks. At this same time in a normal year there would be hundreds, if not thousands of new chicks in the local nesting areas. This year the count is four individual chicks—only four. This is not, the scientists say, anything that has happened before.
Global warming? Anyone with common sense would say yes. Not the present administration of Mr. Bush, however. In fact Bush is on a concerted campaign to tear nature apart, to leave it unable to support life—any kind of life. Among the many changes in law that Bush is striving for:
• Exempt huge companies like ExxonMobile from the clean air act so that they may dump billions of tons of new toxics into the atmosphere
• Exempt mercury from those substances listed as toxic and, instead, treat it as a non-hazardous substance
• Open up all of the 155 national forest lands to oil exploration irregardless of the nature of the environment or the endangered wildlife that use those forests as habitat
• Increase oil and gas drilling in some of the country’s most sensitive and irreplaceable ecosystems
Mr. Bush has said that “more study” needs to be conducted to prove global warming even though the rapid and terrifying changes in the number of hurricanes, flooding, drought and the rapid disappearance of the world’s glaciers prove that, in fact, global warming is here to stay. In a very few years global warming will change the face of the world. It cannot be reversed but it can be stopped if action is taken to do so. Most every nation of the world has already taken steps to reduce their dangerous factory and vehicle emissions except the US. Bush wants to protect his big industry buddies so that their profits don’t sag—it doesn’t matter if island nations are submerged or that thousands of human beings are killed or that thousands of entire species of plant and animals are wiped from the earth. You have to protect that profit margin!
Fight this madness. Write to your representatives in Congress and the Senate and hope that they have some presence of mind to be responsible for once. Responsible to the world—not to Wall Street.
|
