Our California ranch was idyllic. But Earth will never be that green again said journalist Patti Davis . He said also I’m old enough to remember a time when – short of a nuclear disaster – we believed the earth would go on through lifetimes and generations. Seasons would unfold, rains would come, and oceans would remain full of life, some of it mysterious and hidden at great depths.
But we are killing the earth and for anyone who had even a whisper of doubt, the 3,000 page report released this week from the United Nation’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes it chillingly clear. It warned of a “code red for humanity,” and found that extreme weather events are going to be more severe and more frequent.
We are running out of time. Every additional amount of warming ushers in more danger, more damage, more certainty that human beings have accomplished what once seemed unimaginable – we are destroying the planet. Plants and animals going extinct because of our greed and carelessness would get along just fine without us; we, however, can’t get along without them.
Just before this report was published, I received some photographs of the Malibu ranch my parents owned when I was a child. Images that now look like paintings. Was the land ever that green?
I took it for granted then – the sweep of green fields after winter rains that fell for days on end, the way the land turned brown and golden in summer but would look like it was preparing for winter when Fall brought colder air and deep blue skies.
There was a fire season, but it was only a couple of months, and the fires, when they came, were nothing like the infernos now which destroy hundreds of thousands of acres and wipe out entire towns.