I almost forgot to celebrate Earth Day today. Not to worry, because I celebrate the Earth every day. It’s such a beautiful planet with it’s blue water and green grass, trees, rivers, mountains…and it’s home.

When I was taking a science class many years ago, I learned that the Earth recycles itself, every 50, 000 years or so, like the farmers who recycle the soil with different crops. New England might have been desert, or part of the tundra, tropical or as it is now more temperate. For this reason, I do believe in climate change. The Earth just doing her thing and we might be on the cusp of a new season.  Man, and I use that phrase loosely, might not have much of a bearing on the changes occurring as some suspect.

So those naysayers, who proclaim that there is no problem and the changes aren’t as bad as some think, might not be too far off point. The changes might be part of the natural order of things. What they can’t change is that change is coming.

What I find reprehensible is the way we treat her.

She works hard to maintain the right mix of chemical compounds so we can breathe, regulates our water cycle so we have water to drink, provides soil for our food, and animals for our comfort. She’s greased the wheels so to speak around the tectonic plates that move and shift under our feet, and keeps us spinning at just the right slant so we don’t topple over.

But when we extract the oil from the ground, the lubricant that keeps the friction between plates at a minimum, drill beneath the oceans, creating pockets of methane gas that hurt the creatures living there (and food for some), use products that pollute the air, disregard the value of her rivers by dumping toxins into them, bomb her caves or blow up her hallowed ground, we are disrespecting what is, a living breathing entity.

It seems there is a part of the population who doesn’t care about any of these things. They drill, bomb, pollute, extract, frack, thinking it is without consequence.

Science proves that’s not true.

We must take better care of her because if she’s tortured to death, she takes us with her.