It is a dwindling few in our world who have not experienced climate change with their own eyes.  It was not so long ago in this country climate change was still a political football until the storms, heat waves, wildfires, and droughts became an irrefutable fact.  

Farmers and ranchers have their hands in the soil and their eyes on the sky praying there won’t be too much or too little rain for their crops to flourish.  Regardless of the political affiliations, they will be the first to say they are seeing drastic changes in the weather.  

To put it simply, it is human driven, and the more humans consuming products that take Earth’s resources the more we harm this planet.  The sad fact is that our modern societies are set up in such a way that as much as we may personally wish to leave tiny footprints behind, we are inextricably woven into the fabric of consummation.  We need only to look in our recycle bins or our trash cans to see how much waste a single household produces.

I feel compelled to bring up this topic of world population as it still raises eyebrows.  In the movie The Women with Meg Ryan, Annette Bening’s character said the last unacceptable topic to talk about at a dinner party was choosing not to have children.  Young people are now choosing not to have large numbers of children as we are mostly past living in an agrarian society where large families were essential. The world’s population has very recently topped 8 billion. The world population clock can be viewed online with rising numbers of people going up like the odometer reading on our car.  

It is increasingly evident that we must all find our own ways of minimizing our negative impact on land, water, and air.  There could still be time to slow the earth’s rising temperature if we just ask ourselves regularly, “Do I really need so much?”

Featured photo by: Paul Schellekens