Earth Alert

 

by Pa Rock

Water Bearer

Mike Parson, a cattle rancher from Bolivar, Missouri, who also functions as the show-me state’s governor, has issued a “water alert” for the entire state – and it’s only the first week of June.   I have been carrying water to many of my more fragile yard plants since mid-May, giving them long, cool drinks every other evening.  Last year I didn’t begin that process until mid-July.  Summers are getting hotter, quicker, and the heat is lasting longer than in previous years – and in spite of what some Republican politicians encourage us to believe, the primary cause of the devastating heat is climate change caused by manmade activities.
 
Governor Parson is worried about cattle and farming.  I’m worried about small dogwood trees, and rose bushes, and my once lush lawn.  I’m worried about my little pond that is drying up, and the deer who used to gather there each evening for their happy hour.  Those same deer are now having to reach higher into the trees in order to find enough greenery to sustain them through the summer – a time when greenery ought to be plentiful.  My little corner of the Ozarks is dry, and it gets dryer every day.
 
The good news for me is that I won’t have to mow as much this summer as I did last year, and the bad news, of course, is that large patches of my grass will die and my yard will eventually begin to look like the one that I left behind in Arizona a decade ago.
 
Next week I will break out even more plastic jugs and begin carrying even more water.  I will fight climate change as long as I physically can, and then I will lock myself in the house and read “The Grapes of Wrath” one final time.  It is every bit as relevant today as it was in the 1930’s, a tale of how corporate greed is destroying a planet and the lives of people who are struggling to live there.
 
The Earth has been our home for thousands upon thousands of years.  We should have been its protectors.  We have failed.
 
Adieu.