DK GreenRoots

There are far too many reports of environmental injustice suffered here and around the world. Governments can be the problem and even when it can be the solution, lawmakers tied up with corporate interests deny real remedies for years. As Martin Luther King, Jr. stated so eloquently, we don't have to remain in neutral waiting for governments to take action. All it takes is one person who believes we are joined in "an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny" to reach out to others. It is just one person who stood up to provide access to potable water to tens of thousands, two people who succeeded in protecting indigenous lands from corporate eco rapists, one person who introduced functional bamboo bikes to villages and just one person who decided the people needed a simple device to monitor corporate polluters.

President Obama has been working hard to restore U.S. moral leadership after 8 years of Bush's inhumanity and depravity. Effective climate change legislation would show the world our humanity and morality because the target of how much warming we will tolerate will determine who lives or dies. Our troops in Afghanistan understand that 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere should be the target.

There is the related moral issue of who pays for climate change damages. Rich nations are not only primarily responsible for climate change, but also reaped huge economic benefits from placing poorer nations in vulnerable positions that worsened the impacts. Yet, now rich countries bicker about providing monetary "assistance" to developing nations to adapt to climate change impacts as if the payments were charity. Proposed assistance in the millions will not cover the billions of average adaptation costs that is still less than the estimated trillions of ecological damages caused by rich nations. Treating adaptation measures as charity continues the injustice and immorality of not taking responsibility for those external costs never considered or paid by corporations and governments over the years.

Projects that discharge harmful chemicals or pollutants into our environment are allowed to proceed without consideration of the costs to people and environment.  Eventually, after the delay and obstruct game is exhausted, people learn the truth about the harmful nature of the pollutants. It may be decades later, after many people have suffered the pain and suffering of illness or the death of loved ones. So, the companies get corporate welfare in the form of a free waste disposal system while the projects are operated, and after the injustice of contaminating people and environment, taxpayers get to pay for closing down towns that are just too toxic. People, communities, environment are all just so disposable. But what do you do when glaciers have stored chemicals for decades and now release these pollutants banked for years?