{"id":1559,"date":"2014-01-07T06:00:46","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T11:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.knowyouroots.com\/ijustgottashare\/?p=1559"},"modified":"2013-12-20T12:04:44","modified_gmt":"2013-12-20T17:04:44","slug":"whats-this-world-coming-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.knowyouroots.com\/ijustgottashare\/2014\/01\/07\/whats-this-world-coming-to\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s This World Coming To?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Here\u2019s some interesting \u00a0insights from Mike Biltonen (my darling husband), about the state of the planet we all share. Mike is a passionate fruit farmer and serious about local food security.<\/em><\/p>\n

I love Earth. I mean I really love this bright blue shiny ball of currently semi-inhabitable soil, water, and air. But it\u2019s going to Hell in a hand-basket faster than I can say Fukushima.<\/p>\n

Food.<\/b> We produce more food for more people than we ever have in the history of, well, time. Yet, we still have starving people all over the globe (including your own backyard) and can\u2019t seem to get them the food they so dearly need to just make it to tomorrow. We commit massive amounts of acreage across the globe to the production of soybeans, corn, and other \u201ccommodities\u201d so we can grow animals to feed people cheap hamburgers at McDeath. If we commited this acreage growing vegetables and fruits, we could so easily alleviate global warming and starvation in one fell swoop. Of course, getting the food to the people that are starving would require an act of compassion from the so-called Powers to make sure the food could actually get to where it needs to go. Meanwhile, we\u2019re criminalizing the production of food in our frontyards because gardens can\u2019t be mowed.<\/p>\n

Water.<\/b> There are only a few things that living organisms need in order survive, fresh water is one of them. Yet, we seem to keep shitting in our bed to collect a few scheckles from the, a-hem, Powers that be. Fracking is a global disaster. It is a disaster that is more frightening than pesticide and fertilizer runoff into creeks and rivers; more frightening than the depletion of the once massive aquifers; more frightening than the pollution that occurs in oceans and seas. BP? Fukushima? They\u2019re nothing compared to the companies you\u2019ve never heard of \u2013 Apache, Devon, Cabot, Range Resources \u2013 that are building the equivalent of many Fukushimas across the face of North America. Thanks goodness that many nations are outlawing fracking. But here in the good old US, money talks and bullshit walks \u2013 welcome to the new world order (once, GWB never really knew what he was talking about). Why with all of renewable alternatives we have access to would anyone (and, yes, I am talking to you) allow fracking to even be a topic of conversation today?<\/p>\n

Air. <\/b>You thought we solved air pollution with the Clean Air Act? Well, we got rid of the smog that riddled many of this country\u2019s big cities, that\u2019s for sure. But the real danger lies in what we can\u2019t see. We left fracking above, so let\u2019s just start right back up there. Not only does fracking destroy your water, it\u2019ll destroy the air you breathe too. Again, there\u2019s only so much of that wonderful stuff you suck into your lungs thousands of times each day, why muck it up? But the assault on air quality only starts there, it doesn\u2019t end anywhere soon. If you\u2019ve seen pictures of major Chinese cities you\u2019ve seen the smog that comes from the totally uncontrolled factories there, too. The US was smart; it pushed the manufacturing that casued the great pollution fo the 20th<\/sup> century overseas and now you don\u2019t have to see or breathe it. But it does affect you. And me, for one, I\u2019d rather see what I am breathing than not know. We still have plenty of air pollution in the US and fracking and other non-renewable energy companies are the source of the problem.<\/p>\n

And I could go on and on.<\/p>\n

The fact is that we\u2019re doing so many things to destroy the planet in ways we\u2019d never imagined. I mean, for starters, can you imagine the lack of response to the Fukushima disaster. I mean JAPAN\u00a0 KILLED THE ENTIRE PACIFIC OCEAN! And yes we\u2019ll find a way out of this disaster too.<\/p>\n

The thing that I\u2019ve never been able to understand is why we (i.e., humans) don\u2019t get that the real problem is that there\u2019s too many of us. And I don\u2019t mean Americans. Please believe what you want to believe. But as the world\u2019s human population heads towards 11 billion at the end of this century, we left behind a long time ago the ideal population level. Never mind who\u2019s number you believe. The fact is that the ideal human carrying capacity for the planet was closer to a few million than a few billion. Our species uses more resources than all the other species combined. And we pollute their waters, destroy their air, decimate their habitat, leaving no room or resources for ourselves much less all the other species that depend on this same spinning ball of blue.<\/p>\n

I am not sure what it will take for us to realize the errors of our ways. One might\u2019ve thought that we\u2019d figure things out, but, no, we haven\u2019t. Not Hiroshima, not Chernobyl, not Fukushima, not the multitude of smaller eco disasters can set us down a different path. The only true salvation for Earth is going to be disaster that affects us very directly and brings us down to size. Oh we\u2019ll survive, but like the dinosaurs<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s some interesting \u00a0insights from Mike Biltonen (my darling husband), about the state of the planet we all share. Mike is a passionate fruit farmer and serious about local food security. I love Earth. I mean I really love this … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[99],"tags":[62,178,58,717,61],"class_list":["post-1559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-air","tag-food","tag-fracking","tag-fukushima","tag-water"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.knowyouroots.com\/ijustgottashare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.knowyouroots.com\/ijustgottashare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.knowyouroots.com\/ijustgottashare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.knowyouroots.com\/ijustgottashare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.knowyouroots.com\/ijustgottashare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1559"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.knowyouroots.com\/ijustgottashare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1561,"href":"https:\/\/www.knowyouroots.com\/ijustgottashare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559\/revisions\/1561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.knowyouroots.com\/ijustgottashare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.knowyouroots.com\/ijustgottashare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.knowyouroots.com\/ijustgottashare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}