The environment can wait as societal order erodes

What if the gravitas of the environmental movement was temporarily diverted to current critical justice issues?

If your house is on fire, fixing the leak in your roof isn’t a priority. And that’s how I feel about environmental issues as the country devolves into self-imposed chaos.

The same is true for sports. Football’s pro and college championships are looming and I would usually be keen to focus on both, yet they seem trivial in light of recent events.

Events like shooting of innocents in Minneapolis, Portland and Chicago by federal agents, sanctioned by the executive branch of government and largely ignored by the majority party in Congress.

Then there’s the military incursion into a neighboring country to oust and capture its leader, as flawed as he may be. And the revival of loose talk about taking over Greenland, talk that had surfaced months ago and subsided. Canada too is feeling a sense of angst again about a Trump administration incursion be it militarily or financially.

One Canadian pundit recently called for the country to set aside partisan lower priority issues and unite to focus on the threat from its southern neighbor. Those differences could be dealt with later, he said.

On a smaller scale, a writer in Minneapolis called for a timeout on events, including the professional basketball game, in order to fully grasp the impact of the recent U.S. government sanctioned shooting of an innocent woman in a car.

Another post on social media called for a shutdown of the country in order to grasp current events. Alarmist? Maybe or not.

But this space and my previous 15 years or so of reporting and commenting have been dedicated to environmental issues. Mostly water and mostly Great Lakes with some environmental justice sprinkled in.

But issues on the environment evolve over long periods of time, years if not decades. Threats to societal order and justice are actualizing into reality, now, today.

Would it not be better to divert some of the gravitas that environmental protection has, and it’s a lot, to stand up for immigrant rights. To call for an end to armed incursions of federal troops into our neighborhoods.

I have a clear memory of the Flint water crisis where the big non-profit environmental groups mostly stayed on the sidelines as Flint citizens struggled to have basic drinking water. When I queried them on Flint they were either silent or said it’s outside of the scope of what they do. They’ve since evolved and engaged on the issue.

I don’t know how diverting resources from environmental protection to social justice would take place or if it would be effective.

But I do know that it’s the right thing to do. If them, I’d hate to look back a decade from now and say, if only I had …..