It was supposed to be a celebration: the Colorado Environmental Coalition\u2019s 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\u2019s been writing and speaking about climate change.
\n\u201cThis is unusual weather for Denver,\u201d my partner assured me as we drove through the water logged suburban streets in my 2008 Prius. He\u2019s lived here for over forty years, so knows what he\u2019s seeing from first hand observation and experience.
\nClimate 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\u2019t real.
\nHow can this be? How can this continue to be? McKibben\u2019s 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.)
\nBut 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.
\nYet the Biblically evil \u2018powers and principalities,\u2019 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 \u2018civilization.\u2019
\nFor instance I am thinking of Galileo, forced to recant his \u2018heresy\u2019 about the earth moving around the sun when the Church threatened him with torture and death at the stake.
\nI 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.
\nAnd 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!!
\nWe stand at just such another moment in human history.
\nEnough is enough!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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