Urgent need to save our environment
Polluted Nairobi River on September 20, 2016. Campaigns have gone on for the past five months and I am yet to hear any politician mention environmental matters. PHOTO | ANTHONY OMUYA | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- He has eliminated funding for environmental education and denies the reality of climate change.
- The USA has six per cent of the world’s population but contributes to 22 per cent of the planet’s carbon emissions.
Donald Trump has just completed his first 100 days in office.
His tweets remain as frequent and fiery as campaign time and his policies just as incoherent and inconsistent as when first presented.
He still pretends that billionaires’ interests are those of the common folk and so is determined to keep the world in the fossil age.
He has eliminated funding for environmental education and denies the reality of climate change.
He thinks that by ignoring pollution laws and clean energy he will create millions of jobs for the working class.
DESTROYING ENVIRONMENT
The future of our planet is in great danger and Mr Trump cannot deny that.
The USA has six per cent of the world’s population but contributes to 22 per cent of the planet’s carbon emissions.
Put another way; if everyone was to live and waste like Americans we would need four planets of our size to accommodate them.
One fifth of all living species will disappear in the next 20 years while everyday 300 species disappear forever.
Who cares and who is grieving? What sort of planet or country will we hand on to our grandchildren?
How can we claim to love God and cherish our children when we pollute, destroy and rape the beautiful creation we were given freely?
Native Americans believed that we do not inherit the Earth from our parents but that we borrow it from our children.
BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
Let that notion sink gently into your soul and conclude that we need to urgently change our behaviour.
We cannot have unlimited growth and we must confess that it is us humans who are the cause of climate change, pollution and the loss of biodiversity.
We then must start thinking seriously about ecological matters and about generational justice.
Young people are already angry about how we live like there is no tomorrow.
What sort of a planet and what economy are we going to pass on to them?
BURDEN OF DEBT
Generational justice principles must guide our thinking and planning.
Regretfully, most of our politicians only think of the next election and not the next generation.
Campaigns have gone on for the past five months and I am yet to hear any politician mention environmental matters as part of their manifesto.
Hundreds of aspirants defeated in primaries now want to stand as independent candidates but how many candidates will stand on an environmental platform to protest the Lamu Coal Project, the destruction of our forests or the filth and pollution in our cities?
Generational justice is also about the national debt, which has doubled in the past two years and now stands at Sh3.8 trillion — or 53 per cent of our GDP — which means that each child at birth is burdened with a debt of 95,000 on its tiny shoulders.
What madness are we at, in our pursuit of wealth and pleasure?
American writer Terry Tempest Williams warns us: The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.
They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. Are we heeding?
[email protected] @GabrielDolan1
