For as long as I can remember there have been conservationists and environmental crusaders banging on pots, marching with their hand-drawn placards, pontificating on soapboxes and banding together in more organized and well-funded groups like the Sierra Club or the Cousteau Society.  Their singular goal, if I may be simplistic, is the preservation and respect of Nature.  Who could argue with that…right?

Ridiculed and even demonized for their efforts to maintain natural wonders, protect spotted owls and keep man-made pollutants out of our waterways while calling attention to the catastrophic alternative of allowing profits to trump responsibility, the Birkenstocked-Tree-huggers, long bullied by politicians and punch-lined by comics, may soon have the last laugh, (although it will probably be more like a mad, hysterical cackle as our planet crumbles around them).

California is out of water…not running out of water…OUT of water.  That’s right, the place that grows most of our agricultural products has no water to grow them. In Texas and Louisiana and many other unregulated states, energy companies have irreversibly compromised, (poisoned), ground water and damaged fragile geological plates, creating man-made faults.  The stripping of millions of acres of rain forest strictly to fatten greedy, misguided corporate growth, has dire consequence to every living organism on Earth, (although I’m told the cockroach may get a pass).  The signs of over 100 years of irresponsibly bad behavior are all around us, yet the whimpering response to our very survival is far from deafening.  Conferences and studies and too-lean standards, the enforcement of which will not even be in play for a decade or more, are no longer, “better than doing nothing”, they are doing nothing.

I have half-joked for years that the only salvation for the world’s ills would be imminent world disaster or alien invasion, either requiring all of mankind to pull together in response.  Alien invasion is probably unlikely, (unless you’re from Arizona and can’t differentiate between the green and the brown varieties), but world disaster is actually upon us…proving once again, I was dead wrong about the pulling together thing.