CURRENT CONCERN

The Unprecedented Ecological Challenges of the New Year
2018 has ended with plenty turmoil to carry us into the new year. As someone who has been focused rather fiercely on the environmental threats taking a growing toll on our biosphere and atmosphere, it has been an especially discouraging year. The Trump administration has been busy unraveling many of the environmental protections put in place by previous governments since the 1970s. These range from reducing air pollutants from industrial sources, to reductions in chemical pollution of our waterways, to protections for endangered species.

It has never been perfect, and industry continues to contaminate our living systems, but one hates to think about where we would be if these policies had not been in place, if polluters were able to operate unregulated. Sadly, we are moving in the direction of finding out as coal, oil, gas, chemical, mining, and so many other dirty industries are winning major reversals of regulatory policies.

To make matters worse, this past year saw some of the greatest climate-related disasters in human history. From the Great Wildfires in California to record floods and anomalous weather events all across the globe, climate change is setting in at a pace far faster then even most climate scientists had predicted. The scary part of this story is that scientists have been telling us for decades now that once we begin experiencing the impacts of climate change, we will already have passed many tipping points, points of no return to the climate we once knew. We are moving into a new reality without having planned for it, without the leadership and mass awareness it will take to move our world away from the industrial global economy that has brought us to this point.

Read the rest of Margaret Swedish's article here.