Letters: Rescue is the right word for our environment

Posted 6/30/21

The letter by Marci Mowery and Tim Herd in the 24 June Local is welcome and important.  The heading encapsulates its significance.

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Letters: Rescue is the right word for our environment

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The letter by Marci Mowery and Tim Herd in the 24 June Local  is welcome and important.  The heading encapsulates its significance. Their title was not " a plan to rescue our people," a thought probably in many minds about now, along with "I can hardly wait to get back to normal."  Their title was A plan to rescue our people, parks and forests. 

For perhaps the last 10,000 years, to people living on earth the visible "normal" dealt almost exclusively with humans, and usually with a highly select group of humans, many of whom considered themselves "the normal," and were largely unaware of how the "others" lived - or did not live. Those others are not limited to the almost 1 percent of people who have fled their homes, or the 20 percent living in extreme poverty and who are like a culture plate to a virus. Those others include the parks and the forests, without which humans do not survive, much less flourish.  In the last 50 years the bird population in the US has decreased 29%,  70% of the species of amphibians are dying off, total marine populations have decreased 52 % in the last 40 years, and large marine species 92%; a German study showed a decrease of 75% in the biomass of flying insects in 30 years.  

If we humans wish to survive - much less have live worth living - we should not draft a Plan to rescue our people, because that probably plan will fail!  It will fail unless it includes parks, forests, rivers, insects, oceans - all of  Nature - as of equal worth to humans and equally or more important than people. Further, not only must we have a "plan to rescue our people, parks and forests parks, forests, rivers, insects, oceans - all of  Nature.  ," we have to enact the plan.

If we return to "normal" life, what has been living long before we arrived will suffer seriously, and we with them.  Not only do we not have the right to be so devastatingly destructive to others, but also, we depend on those others, of whom most of us have been unaware.

Yes, the correct verb is "to rescue.”

George L. Spaeth
Chestnut Hill

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