Extreme climate changes

Anyone who reads newspapers, magazines or the internet, knows that the world is on fire. Literally. Big areas everywhere get lost. Last week in the middle of the winter big parts of California were on fire and governor Jerry Brown declared a ‘drought emergency’ for his state…! 90% of California suffers from drought now.

At the same time New York suffered one of its severest winters, instead of fire, with extreme low temperatures.

This is a surprising development: on one side of the country everything burns, while on the other side everything freezes. The lack of reaction of the world to these extremes is even more surprising: people are already so used to extremes, that the extremes seem to be normal to them.

Although a whole state - which was once the Garden of Eden of the US - is suffering from serious drought and is partly on fire, many people in the US, especially politicians, deny that something is happening. Why is this?

Maybe one of the main causes is that more and more people live in cities. They have no idea that they are connected to Mother Earth. They have no idea what that is, earth, soil, humus. They have no idea that one m³ (27 ft³) of good and healthy soil contains more living beings than the whole Atlantic Ocean. Living beings that are now being burned in California.

The problem is that they are so disconnected, that for them “food and drinks” are not a synonym anymore for “plants, meat, milk and water”. Food means processed food or hamburgers and children think that milk is made in the factory. Just like cola, the stuff that makes you so happy. If there was no processed food and no cola, and if there was no transport, and suddenly Los Angeles had to live from the food produced from Mother Earth around the city, then everybody in LA – including the politicians - would understand the big disaster that Mother Earth is burning around them.

It would mean no plants, no meat, no milk, no water. Happy enough they have a small part of healthy Mother Earth left, in Brazil. And happy enough they have transport. So let burn California, no problem. Let’s just cut the Amazon area and plant if full with GMO soya. Healthy processed food. Problem solved.....

Pieter Hoff,
The Green Musketeer