We Can Run – We Can Try To Hide – But There Is No Planet B

While simultaneously trying to stay safe and reopen the economy, the COVID 19 pandemic reminds us daily that we are all part of the interconnected web of life on earth.  We are struggling with unprecedented disruptions in healthcare and the economy, as climate disasters increase in frequency and intensity, exacerbating health risks. (1) Long after this wave of infections ebb, and a vaccine is developed, we will still live with the reverberations . In the grand scheme of things, Mother Earth doesn’t give a fig about politics, the stock market, big profits, or the lines we draw in the sand that divide us.  Nor does she need us.  Basically, we live on a big rock floating in the vast cosmos, with a unique environmental system of which we are a very-small part. Our lives depend on a thin, delicately balanced layer of invisible gases (2)  and a massive, diverse population of flora and fauna. (3) This is her environment and it is up to us to figure out how to live within her ecosystem.  If we screw it up, we live or die with our choices. Everything we do, affects the whole…think of the butterfly effect as metaphor.(4) When we pollute air molecules here, they keep going around the earth; when we pollute water molecules here, they continue around the earth – no passport required.

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WHO’S LOOKING OUT FOR THE INDEPENDENT FAMILY FARM?

Low commodity prices, crop destroying weather, and Trump’s tariffs and trade war with China (and as of June 16th India, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/06/16/trade-war-india-hits-u-s-more-tariffs/1471140001/ ) are having a devastating effect on our family farmers!  The 2018 Farm Bill, as well as past farm subsidies, are failing independent family farmers.  For decades hundreds of thousands of our tax dollars have been given to factory farms owned by “city slickers” (Scott Fuller, Opinion Contributor to The Hill (11-29-2018), and to foreign owned corporations with multiple operations in more than one country, as well as the U.S.  Things do not look any brighter for the next round of aid expected to begin in July.  It’s time we ask, who is looking out for the family farmer?  The current administration and the GOP don’t seem to be.

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