“There’s one thing that’s absolutely clear; if you increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, it warms things up,” the Rev. Owen Owens, author of “Living Waters: How to Save Your Local Stream” and chair of Valley Creek Restoration Partnership, said. “It’s not a belief and I’ve spent my life dealing with religious belief. This is no belief.”
Last Thursday in a captivating discussion on climate change in the Mansion, members making up an interfaith panel talked about critical environmental issues.
The Earth is being damaged and destroyed everyday and because many Americans don’t see the damage face-to-face, we assume it isn’t real or pretend it doesn’t exist.
“It’s a corrupt, basically evil system and the result of it is it unmakes creation and unmaking God’s good creation is a sin against God, against other human beings and against animals and plants that give us life,” Owens said while talking about natural gas fracturing, a controversial practice to remove natural gas from deep within the earth.
Natural gas fracturing has allegedly been the reason for contaminated water supplies and destroyed watersheds. Many of these allegations were revealed during a documentary done by Josh Fox, an American film director and environmental activist.
“All 3000 Carteret Pacific islanders are relocating to another community off Papua New Guinea as a result of devastating effects from climate change,” Sr. Mary Elizabeth Clark, Director of the Sisters of St. Joseph Earth Center at Chestnut Hill College, said.
People here about sea levels rising, more natural disasters occurring and other abnormalities but when people are directly affected is when eyes start to really open and realize something may not be right after all.
“We don’t have a democracy, democracy is when the people ultimately underneath are making the choices, the choices are being given to us by the top ten percent,” retired EPA lawyer and author Brad Whitman, said.
Whitman talked about the attitude in America and the need for it to change. The way he sees this happening is in a democratic way but with the government structure we have in place now he doesn’t believe it will happen.
