I’m writing too many serious posts these days, but I won’t apologize for it. Not yet. There seem to be a lot of serious things to discuss.

This one tackles something that bothers me on many levels.  It’s the looming disaster known as Global Warming/Climate Change.  Maybe you think “looming disaster” is too strong a statement – but thousands of scientists worldwide are backing it up.

Despite this knowledge, as a society we’re doing very little to improve the situation.  Human nature tends to veer our attention to shorter term pleasures over long term (boring things) such as saving for our own future or saving the planet for the future persistence of humanity.

Take for example professional sports.  So much time, energy and money goes into the numerous sports leagues around the world.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that – they provide joy to millions of fans.  But it seems we should each be putting just as much time/energy/money into whatever is needed to ensure the planet can support life ongoing.  Without that, our favourite hockey teams won’t mean much – in fact they won’t exist at all – and neither will their fans – all of us.

That’s just one example.  To the list we could add the movie industry, travel industry, personal care, even our pets!  We spend billions and billions on these things – and they all have one thing in common.  If the earth can no longer support life they will all be gone.  All of them.

When I hear people say that “we can’t afford a carbon tax” I really can’t believe it.  People, your money will be no good to you in a world with no people.  Sure we could forget about making any changes to our economy – maintain status quo and maintain our current standard of living – for now.  But eventually it will all be gone.  Or we could make the difficult changes now that could lead to sustainable life on our planet.

Right now it’s like we’re all patients who have been given a short time to live unless we make drastic changes to our lifestyle.  But we’re living it up – ignoring doctors orders.  Maybe it’s time we thought about our futures instead?

I don’t know about you but right now I’m feeling underwhelmed and overwhelmed at the same time. It’s not really a good feeling. There are so many things to think about – to be worried about – in our world today. And there don’t seem to be a lot of answers or solutions. I work in an organization focused on wildlife preservation and the outdoors and we do lots of great work. At the same time I wonder (doubt?) if it’s enough. Things are changing at a rapid rate and we are still doing destructive things to our environment – our world and even beyond. To be honest it’s way too much for me to think about most of the time and I’m one of the ones who often buries my head in the sand and just tries to forget about it all. That adds to my feeling of uneasiness though and there’s the guilt that comes along with it.

But there are so many things to try to tackle and ignoring the issues is so much easier. There’s mental health/addictions, political termoil, nuclear threat, hunger/poverty, technology and its part in the destruction of real social networks, economic uncertainty, lack of connection to nature, food security/mass farming, water shortages, drug resistant disease, increased weather related disasters and more.

Recently our city of Sault Ste. Marie was featured in a W5 documentary about the opiod crisis which has grasped many cities around the country. So many people are dealing with addiction issues and the availability of these extremely potent, often fatal, drugs are putting a massive strain on addicts, their families and the underfunded system that is supposed to try to protect people from themselves. The statistics are staggering and the stories about people who live right here in our city, who are dealing with this on a daily basis, made it real for many in our community who didn’t know, or didn’t want to believe that there’s a problem. I think many people’s eyes have been opened. Unfortunately it will likely be just another issue to turn a blind eye to after the initial shock wears off. Even worse, there are many around who think that it’s the addict’s fault – that they don’t change their ways because they don’t want to. Or that addiction isn’t a “disease” because the person made a choice to start doing drugs. This black and white way of looking at things isn’t the addict’s reality though. There are many issues including poverty, mental health issues, social issues etc. that feed into it. Sure it may have been a bad decision to start doing drugs but that doesn’t mean that addiction isn’t a true disease, any more than cancer, diabetes or schizophrenia are real diseases. And there’s still this perception that if it’s “in your head” it’s not a disease. I know first hand that people experiencing any sort of mental health issue can have very real symptoms that are just as debilitating as diabetes, a broken leg or even the flu. The reality is that all pain is “in your head” since without the brain you wouldn’t feel pain – whether that pain is being triggered by you leg, your lungs or your mind. It is an extreme over-simplification to only attribute illness to some organs and not others.

We all have stories of people who are close to us dealing with difficult things in their lives. Just this week a family member was suicidal and in need of police and medical intervention. Another friend is having to go through yet another round of chemotherapy to try to keep the cancer that is spreading through her body at bay. All difficult and overwhelming situations.

But I guess in a few days I might have buried my head in the sand and things may look rosy again.