Global warming: We need to act now

My daughter once moved away to a smaller town for a while and every time she came for a visit she would comment on how the city stinks.  I never gave it much thought, but when I returned from a trip to Alaska where the air is still relatively clean I realized that she had spoken the truth.  It took me a couple of days to adjust to the smell of the pollution caused by the city's population.  Of course the smell was stronger because it was cold when I returned and the pollution sat closer to the ground.  I noticed that for about a week I was really tired while my body adjusted to the change in atmosphere and I had little appetite.  I have also noticed that in some of the places that I go to watch hawks and other birds around the city, if I take pictures the haze of pollution shows up in them quite noticeably depending on the angel of the light.  To cut to the chase, I have been seriously considering  moving to a smaller community.

But because I am just now learning a great deal about the impact human activity has on the natural world, the wildlife and the environment, I realized if we all moved  to smaller communities to escape city pollution, we would only be spreading the pollution through our present activities, which would solve nothing at all.  In fact doing so would put further strain on the environment and the wildlife whose habitat would be forever changed, or destroyed entirely. I do not really need to know exactly how everything on this planet is intertwined, I just know that it is.  There are, however, people that do know something about it who can explain it to you.  Of these people David Suzuki is one who I greatly admire.  You can go here to read about his concerns in regards to our oceans and explanations of the cause and effect of global warming:
http://beta.davidsuzuki.org/learn/keeping-our-oceans-healthy/
 http://beta.davidsuzuki.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=1&tag=climate%20change&limit=5
 http://beta.davidsuzuki.org/do/tell-the-pm-you-want-action-on-climate-change/

Also consider the following:
News:Global carbon emissions are up
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/11/global-carbon-emissions-29-2000-6-c-temp-rise.php?dcitc=th_rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+treehuggersite+%28Treehugger%29

MORE NEWS: Politician trying to axe legislation for environmental improvements
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/11/gop-ramps-up-attacks-dems-clean-energy-reform-2010-elections.php?dcitc=th_rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+treehuggersite+%28Treehugger%29
 http://www.greendaily.com/2009/11/16/obama-and-world-leaders-hedge-on-copenhagen-agreement/

Over the past few years I've also heard a lot of talk about managing your life and your finances.  Well what about managing our environment? What do you do if you've somehow messed up your finances for example and find yourself in serious debt?  Do you not immediately set out to correct the problem once you have discovered it?  Do you not tighten your belt by spending less, create a new budget and put away your credit cards until the problem has been resolved? Or do you ignore the problem and hope that it goes away, only to have it get to the point where you find yourself in a financial stranglehold?

As a whole we humans are very intelligent but we have a lot to learn about the consequences of our actions.
It is time we woke up to the fact that, without meaning to, we really messed up our environment and nothing short of immediate action is required to correct the problems that were created. While it is true that there is much you can do at home to help in this regard, much more still needs to be done.  It seems to me that the need for more aggressive action by  the governments of the world is a critical factor here in getting results and a real push needs to be made in that direction.  From all I hear we are not making much progress in staving off the effects of global warming, for instance, and the wildlife and marine life is still dying out at too great a rate, when it shouldn't be dying out at all, except as nature dictates. We are not, and never have been separate from the chain of life!!  We need to make this clear to governments everywhere, along with the fact that we need to fix  the damage to the environment now.

With the Copenhagen climate summit fast approaching,  more of us need to lobby governments, both as individuals and in groups to make our demand for action very clear.  It is true that there are already groups working hard and doing the lobbying like the WWF for example, but it doesn't seem to be enough.  Already there is some talk that the Copenhagen summit will fail to produce some of the desired results, but it is still not too late to make our presence and demands known.  It is not too late to save this planet and its inhabitants, but there just might come a time when it will be, if we do nothing.

Think about it, where would we all go if the earth were to be destroyed through our actions?  I agree with David Suzuki, it is not as though there is another planet handy in our universe that  is both readily available and inhabitable, and at the same time uninhabited.

Susan