Losing It All

If you live long enough, you will lose everything from your childhood.

I’ve kept this adage in mind for quite a while now. I’ve felt it as, one by one, family members and friends and pets passed on. I’ve felt it as towns and cities I once knew and loved morph into something a bit alien. I’ve felt it as society and politics coarsens into cultural war.

So human society is always changing. What I did not expect is that the world, itself, the land, the water, the ecosystems, the environment, the biosphere of my childhood days would also be lost.

Since my childhood, over SEVENTY PERCENT of the world’s wildlife has been wiped out.

There is now more tonnage of plastic in the sea… than fish.

Glacier National Park will soon have zero glaciers. Greenland may soon have zero glaciers. The Antarctic ice fields are melting.

The climate is out of control. Greenhouse gasses are now so thick in the atmosphere that the planet is getting hotter and hotter, which, ironically, can make winters wilder and wilder. We humans caused this, and don’t seem to have much intention of slowing the hurting.

Underground aquifers are being drained at an alarming rate, while some are being poisoned by human-made and deployed chemicals.

So much other damage — that we humans have caused — all around, and deep within this magical planetary orb.

The first “sacred” place I ever encountered… the place where my first “spiritual” epiphany occurred… is the Big Bend of Texas. The heart of that special place is the Rio Grande River. It is currently dry. Bone dry.

Humans come and go. Human cultures come and go. Through it all, well, at least since the last Ice Age ten thousand years ago, what sustained was nature. Now we have become “gods” — or, really, more like “demons” — upon the Earth, destroying at will. This, to me, is the saddest loss of all. One that negatively impacts literally every living thing. We inherited paradise, and smashed it.