Time to stop kidding ourselves

Picture yourself traveling through space. Ahead hovers your home, a glowing bright blue orb reflecting the sun’s light off its vast oceans in the otherwise inky-cold blackness of space.

As you know from your travels among the unimaginable vastness of the cosmos, planet Earth is a unique and infinitesimal bubble of life within the uninhabitable and unforgiving vacuum of space.

From the Bible, in the Book of Romans, chapter 1, verse 20, we are told, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”

You consider this verse as you move closer to Earth, reflecting on daily miracles that are taken for granted on your home planet — the 8 million diverse species of abundant life that have evolved on our little spec of a satellite that orbits a minor star that resides near the end of one arm of a spiral galaxy of approximately 250 billion stars that is in-turn just one of the estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe.

On Earth, flowers bloom, caterpillars become butterflies; the sun rises and sets in beautiful shades of orange and yellow. Water vapor rises invisibly into the air, collects in the atmosphere, then falls again as rain. People plant gardens, then sit back and watch things magically grow from the ground into the food that will later be eaten to nourish and fuel their bodies. Snow falls in the mountains where it is stored until spring when it melts and is cleansed as it cascades down the mountainside, making it safe for us to drink.

So far as we know today, our world, spaceship Earth, to borrow R. Buckminster Fuller’s term, is a unique place where all manner of amazing things have evolved into a natural cycle that operates in concert with all the other living things encased within the life-giving sphere of Earth’s atmosphere.

And this sphere is all we’ve got. Beyond it is the cold, black void of space — and death.

So, let’s say we forget about all the finger pointing and minutia that is the climate change debate, whether it’s a natural cycle or man-made or a combination of both. Just look around you, read the news about things like the scorching heat wave gripping Western Europe in unseasonably extreme weather that forecasters expect to last through August while, not unlike recent summers in the Western U.S., wildfires rage.

Consider that there are so many gray whales dying of malnutrition off the coast of Washington —twice as many so far this year than during an entire normal year — that officials are challenged to find a place to put the carcasses, according to recent media reports. Other whales found dead in places like the Philippines and Italy had between 48 and 90 pounds of plastic in their stomachs.

Meanwhile, arctic ice is rapidly melting away. A recent United Nations report warned that the Canadian arctic was warming at twice the global rate.

Soon, the only way to see a glacier in Glacier National Park will be from historical photos. Of the 35 original named glaciers in the park, only 26 remained as of 2015, while the remaining ice had, at that time, shrunk in size by between 39 and 85 percent according to the National Park Service. The United States Geologic Service estimates all will be gone sometime between 2030 and 2080.

If we subscribe to what the Book of Romans tells us, that we are clearly witnessing God’s invisible quality and eternal power, then we are in deep trouble because She’s obviously unhappy with the state of things.

Which is the point here: clearly something is radically amiss on our little blue planet. Argue otherwise all you want, but the evidence is clear that things are changing, and not for the better.

I think Bill Nye the Science Guy recently put it best in an uncharacteristic, profanity-laced viral video.

“By the end of this century, if emissions keep rising, the average temperature on Earth could go up another 4 to 8 degrees,” Nye said as he takes a propane torch and lights a desk globe on fire, while suggesting that the audience grow up. “What I’m saying is, the planet’s on (expletive) fire.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. After all, spaceship Earth is all we have protecting us from the cold vacuum of space. We should start taking better care of it.

Lee Hughes can be reached at [email protected].