End Times: New York Times Article Buried Under Ukraine News

Very Unpopular STRONG Opinions Blog by Christyl Rivers

Doom scrolling is distracting

The wee hours of this morning found me doom scrolling the New York Times.

Can the world mount a useful response? Has Putin committed suicide yet?

Like everyone else, I am distracted from another issue that also affects all life on Earth.

An article, the Unseen Toll of a Warming World grabbed my attention by the throat.

Months and months ago, I added to this article. In short, it outlines how people across the country are having our mental health walloped like no other time in history.

Obviously, there are the physical effects of blizzards, hurricanes, heat waves, famine, conflict and wildfires. There are vanishing livelihoods, meaning and purpose. There are people losing hope.

There are landscapes — and seascapes — losing wildlife, beauty, and even our greatest source of inspiration and healing: nature.

We’ll never hear those birds sing again

My teeny contribution was to describe how two lovely robins, (I called her Robin Right, and him, Mr. Right) that nested on our Pacific Northwest Porch in the spring and summer of 2021, vanished.

The photo is of the Right family’s three carefully tended, gorgeous blue eggs.

After the triple digit heatwave — a heat dome — scorched my home land with record setting temperatures, the birds disappeared. We were gone at the time. I will never know what happened, but of course, anyone could guess.

The record temperatures killed more than 500 people in the region, and sparked lethal fires. By fall, floods between Canada and the northern states obliterated farm lands and killed hundreds of farm animals.

The IPCC keeps waking us up, but we hit snooze

We’re tired. We’ve been through two years of pandemic. Many are fighting for livelihood on several fronts.

We need to learn to care what the science and IPCC says, but we’re too worried now about Putin and his ilk.

The possible fall of democracies tumbling the world into chaos, nuclear fire, and authoritarianism is terrifying. People and places like Ukraine are fighting for their lives.

As difficult as it is to face up to our influence upon the world, every single person has to step up.

We could benefit from rationing, not just oil and gas, but our time, our care, our ability to join the most noble cause the world has ever known:

We need to ensure the birds sing.

It’s not just one front, of course. It’s the war, and the waste, and the injustice.

It’s domination hierarchy in all its forms, whether totalitarian and shredding of voices and choice, or whether its destruction of the living planet for short term profits.

Please boycott waste. Of resources. Of life. Of time.

Some people do not even remember what birdsong sounds like. What it does for the human soul.

For the sake of every scrap of physical and mental health, everything we wish to protect, everything we need, and everything we love, we must remember what spring is for.

We need rebirth.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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