Cosmic Reflections

It was supposed to be a celebration: the Colorado Environmental Coalition’s Rebel With a Cause Award being presented to Bill McGibben. On a cold rainy evening in downtown Denver, the weather itself was a fitting testimony to what he’s been writing and speaking about climate change.
“This is unusual weather for Denver,” my partner assured me as we drove through the water logged suburban streets in my 2008 Prius. He’s lived here for over forty years, so knows what he’s seeing from first hand observation and experience.
Climate change is already upon us, way ahead of schedule. Yet in his acceptance remarks, McKibben shares that the U.S. House of Representatives has just passed a Resolution (by 60 votes?!) proclaiming that global warming isn’t real.
How can this be? How can this continue to be? McKibben’s book The End of Nature, the first book written for the general audience on what humans are doing to the planet, was published over twenty years ago. (I read it ten years ago.)
But scientists have been aware and worried for far longer than that, thanks to the observations sent back by NASA satellites monitoring the planet for over forty years in the space program, Milt (rocket scientist/engineer) assures me.
Yet the Biblically evil ‘powers and principalities,’ renamed politics and profit in our era, have continually obstructed the acceptance of facts and then politically prevented effective action, as has happened throughout western ‘civilization.’
For instance I am thinking of Galileo, forced to recant his ‘heresy’ about the earth moving around the sun when the Church threatened him with torture and death at the stake.
I am picturing poor Darwin, reluctant to publish his insights on the Origen of Species, as if dreading the fallout that in fact has continued these 100-plus years and is still at issue.
And I am mindful that an early Church Bishop in Egypt burnt all the scrolls in the Alexandria library and had his henchmen flay the flesh from the woman in charge, an act that essentially destroyed all the recorded knowledge of the ancient world, and threw humankind into the 1000 years of ignorance known as the Dark Ages. A THOUSAND years!!
We stand at just such another moment in human history.
Enough is enough!