Living Green
Water and Sky
By Bryan Hayes
Do you remember a time when across the skyline of pretty much any city there was a cloud of smoke across any city skyline? A haze hovered over the city that could be seen miles away.
Have you ever gone somewhere where smog was so thick that you would cough?, You might have seen people routinely walking around with masks on to protect themselves from the air.
Often, we do not miss something until it’s gone. It is so easy to take something (or someone) for granted. You may not truly appreciate it (or them) until it they’re gone.
There isn’t much thought that goes into the daily routine of grabbing your keys and wallet before heading out the door to work every morning. But, when they’re misplaced it becomes extremely urgent to find them. Suddenly, everything in the wallet is incredibly valuable. And if you cannot find your lost item, you may only just realize what the item functioned as.
With the ever-changing climate (pardon the pun) on the political landscape, it is easy to lose sight of what we have in our proverbial wallet: clear air and clean water.
While we can argue on the short-term benefits and losses of keeping and enhancing current regulations or rolling them back (which seems to be the current course or regulation), it is safe to say that we can all agree that clean air and clean water is something we all want.
How we get there is another story, but it is our story to write. It is not only for ourselves, but for our children, their children, their children, and theirs. What we do today will impact future generations.
While we may take it for granted every time we walk outside, or drink a glass of water, there are many areas of the world that are not so fortunate. We may feel like it couldn’t happen here and that we would not have those basic necessities snatched from us, but for those of us who have gone through a hurricane, we know the effects of living without running water for extended periods of time.
Again, we often do not give turning on the faucet (or the lights) much thought until we no longer have it available to us.
Clean water and clean air are too important for us to take lightly. They are only two issues regarding sustainability: our natural resources, and how much value and priority we put on them. While they may not make the headlines, there has been a lot of priority change, policy modification, and shifts in focus in a relatively short period of time.
The National Geographic website is tracking the administration changes regarding science and internet. You can follow along as well.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/03/how-trump-is-changing-science-environment/
While these changes are ongoing, and then some, what proactive steps are we doing to ensure that we have clean water and clean air not only for ourselves but for future generations?
We all know that feeling of having misplaced our keys and/or our wallet and how lost we feel without them. Hopefully, when it comes to our most basic needs, we have the infrastructure in place to not have to realize what it is like to lose them.
Living in a free society each one of us is a voice. We can exclaim what are our priorities and what we value, not just nationally, but within our own community. We can work together to find solutions. We are more like than we realize, and while we do have differences, we all share the same water and the same sky.