A collection of calamities

Enrique Eguiguren, Editor

© REUTERS
VICTORIA RAZO/AFP/Getty Images

The world is ending. People didn’t listen to scientists for years about the dangers of ignoring our ecological impact, and now those chickens have come to roost.

In the past month, we’ve seen two major hurricanes devastate the US and Caribbean islands and a massive earthquake hit Mexico, and Hurricane Jose might still manage to hit the US and Caribbean islands at least somewhat, it’s hard to tell at this point.

Not to say these are acts of God, not by any stretch of the imagination, hurricanes happening during hurricane season are in no way divine punishment for a corrupted world. That being said, these hurricanes do serve as an important reminder of our sins as a human race, especially in America.

We are a nation whose greatest export is garbage, and who have so much garbage that we had to give some of it to China, and when states are banned from exporting the garbage to China, we end up with recycling centers that are overflowing with our waste.

Yet for a nation that has so much trash and tends to be shockingly cavalier with our environment compared to other developed countries, we don’t seem concerned with the effects of our lackluster environmental policies. We’ve known for years that if we did not address the causes of climate change, we would end up in a world with a great deal more natural disasters and complications than the one we live in now. These events are not entirely unusual, but they’re not normal either, and we can’t risk having what Accuweather’s president Dr. Joel Myers, when speaking about Hurricane Harvey, estimated as “… the costliest and worst natural disaster in American history.” These hurricanes could cost up to $240 billion and dozens of lives lost every other year. If any good comes of these disasters, hopefully, it will be that the US and our neighbors will take climate change as seriously as we take acts of terrorism, which do not cost us nearly as much money or lives as these disasters.