A Global Crisis…

…and a Personal Calamity

After watching Greta Thunberg rail at the world’s leaders during the recent COP26 conference in Glasgow, Scotland, lambasting them for their hypocrisy in giving lip service to protecting the environment after the Paris 2015 symposium while doing little to actually protect Mother Earth during the last six years, it was almost refreshing to see their faces when the teenager took them to task. Little Greta, the dainty Danish damsel with the flamethrower mouth, made clear that she was not disposed to look kindly on the meaningless cant of politicians.

Sea-levels rising at record levels, evoking images reminiscent of Kevin Costner’s Water World, are triggering coastal migrations, now only in their nascent stages, but soon to be in the hundreds of millions, as hamlets, villages, towns, cities, indeed, entire regions will be submerged beneath the waves. Some of these areas, including South and Southeast Asia, much of Africa, and Latin America, contain the Third World or developing countries, with populations besieged with ignorance, poverty, and hunger.

But they are not alone. Europe and North America host hundreds of millions of people, whose shores will be subject to increasingly harsh deluges, flooding, and sinking into the ocean. Crop losses, extinction of countless species, and other mass damage are part of the new stark…