Climate change no longer tops US environment worries
The people who get on the telephone and pester other people to tell them what’s important and what isn’t have made a disturbing discovery. Whereas the US public used to think global climate change was the daddy longlegs to fret about, they’ve switched horses. Now they’re worrying about whether they’re going to have enough water to drink, along with a few other things.
Considering how well informed, literate, intelligent and prone the US public is to worry about what celebrity is fooling around on a spouse, or what dress some celebrity wore to some function, this represents a surprisingly practical and unlikely issue for the citizenry to choose for concern.
Not to say it’s timely. Timely might have been better defined as back before the fish in all those major rivers downstream from cities discharging treated sewage into them developed worrisome ulcers on their skins. And became scary to eat in other ways.
Timely would have been back when there weren’t houses over all the major aquifers built to demand future water until the mortgages were paid off in four decades. Timely would certainly have included a population asking itself,
“Am I going to be able to eat [or even smoke] the grass I’m irrigating by robbing water from an aquifer with a 100,000 year recharge cycle? Any chance this golf course would grow grain crops as a better use of non-renewable and as-yet uncontaminated water?”
But the telephone pesterers didn’t go a step further and ask the well-informed pestered what, precisely, they’re each doing to better the situation. Maybe the next p0ll will do that. The answers will involve writing letters to politicians and signing petitions, almost certainly. Not flushing the commode once a day and keeping the showers short.
Sure as hell not letting the lawn die and the golf clubs rust.
Old Jules
