This morning a red cardinal pecked away at the feeder hanging in my patio bird habitat. As I drove off to work, I thought about the delicate bones and feathers, the lightweight and aerodynamic body of the bird, and the interesting fact that birds are not hierarchical. In other words, the bird is never going to worship me the way my dog does because he doesn’t consider me above him. Birds, even though they are afraid of us, consider us rather beneath them. If you take something from your pet bird, he or she might pick a fight with you in an effort to take the perceived personal property straight back.  

But they can’t take back the world from us, the world that heats up a bit each year, smashing weather records causing species to die off. Most of us never take the time to think about the enormous amount of death caused by climate change. When species disappear, they leave a void in the ecosystem that they formerly populated, affecting the entire food chain. But even if, as amateur scientists and hobby writers, we understand this loss in its functional sense, the loss of a food source, most of us fail to realize how heartbroken we will be when commonplace animals and insects cease to exist.

Today, as I drove to my job, I thought about how much I love my little bird area and the interesting, verbally affluent characters that visit it each day for seeds and water. I also thought about what my patio area would look like without my colorful, feathered, and noisy little friends. Birds aside, we will soon experience the loss of polar bears in the wild, and when they go, the ecosystem will suffer in ways that we can yet understand. The suffering they now endure is painful to watch.

I hope we, as sentient beings fully capable of measuring and critiquing our effects on the environment, begin to analyze the consequences of failing to mitigate the horrors ahead of us if we continue to burn fossil fuels unabated. As a connected world, we will be able to view these tragedies, these heartbreaking cataclysmic moments, as they occur. It is time we felt a connection, and some kind of empathy, to our natural world.

            The book, “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” written by David Wallace-Wells (writer for New York Magazine), dishes up a frightening dose of climate reality including analysis pertaining to why the muted message to the public hampers progress and endangers innocent people living in developing countries. A few chapters into the book, I became deeply disappointed in my local Houston, Texas, news channels and media outlets because of the completely silent response to our own regional climate change reality and the continuous and mindless focus on junk entertainment. Reading the book in its entirety, and then reflecting on its frightening but well-supported material, rearranged my own personal priorities about the natural world. I feel as if we need to start ignoring junk entertainment and news and start focusing on how to solve the climate problem.

            The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) meets periodically to measure the effects of climate change on people in developing countries, and, sadly, even though third world peoples clearly impose the tiniest fraction of a fraction of carbon imprint, they will, according to data and recent experience, undoubtedly, suffer the most. Bangladeshi is a prime example of how climate change will create millions of refugees with no place to go and no means to get there. As coastlines disappear, along with vegetation and available farming land, people will die and starve.

            This is happening now, but I am hearing more about Beyonce’s new film and other fluff than the atrocities happening in vulnerable communities (Houston, her hometown, is extremely vulnerable). Media, and this includes stars and personalities, must begin to raise awareness and cultivate an ongoing conversation that informs and educates because big corporations and big oil have been doing their best to suppress the truth about climate change. Besides, selfish media personalities and vainglorious politicians will soon look extremely silly, evil, and ill-informed at this crucial point in history. People will begin to see that they have been scammed by a rich elite that believes they can build and buy their way out of the deleterious and calamitous effects of climate change. Believe me, this is not going to work for them. Life, life as we understand it, is on the edge of extinction. But instead of a dose of reality, all we get is a tremendous amount of butt wiggling and hair tossing, stuff I can do without. If someone wants to butt wiggle and hair toss to raise money for Bangladesh, then I am good with that because at least some people would have food and shelter while raising awareness about this disaster that will undoubtedly wipe out huge swaths of life on our planet. Once you begin to look down the barrel of climate change in a realistic way, then other problems in life like phony people at work and vacay plans seem superficial in a profoundly sad and shocking way.

I encourage everyone to read the climate change science and help spread the word while finding ways to limit your own carbon footprint.