Pivotal point with climate

On another smoke-filled August day, my neighbors with asthma and COPD are sealed in their homes, struggling to breathe, hoping to avoid hospitalization or worse.

Last October, peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a University of Idaho professor’s research showing human-caused climate change has doubled the cumulative area of Western forest fires.

Some use the pejorative “climate alarmist,” but the fact is, we aren’t alarmed enough. People don’t like to talk and learn about climate change, because it is scary.

We are at a pivotal point. Ice-core samples reveal the composition of earth’s atmosphere going back 400,000 years. This evidence shows that over the past 10,000 years, the earth’s climate has been particularly stable. The development of agriculture and the rise of human civilization were made possible by a stable climate. Now, human civilization is destabilizing that climate at our peril.

Fear of upsetting the economy, comfort with the status quo and policy crafted by the powerful to prolong power and not to advance justice cannot be allowed to determine our fate. We must be brave, bold and imaginative, not to end our way of life, but to save it.

Rebecca MacMullan

Spokane