Welcome to the Progressive Pathway blog, the virtual home of Corbett Kroehler’s climate crisis advocacy and authorship!
Living in Central Florida, along a common hurricane tracking path, I’ve been asked whether I believe that global warming causes wind storms. The short answer is that no, it does not.
However, it has a cause in common with the intensity and number of hurricanes, deforestation. The same apocalyptic burning of old-growth cloud forests and rain forests in Central America, South America and West Africa adds unspeakable tons of carbon to the atmosphere and robs the planet of a key defensive weapon in regulating wind storms.
By halting mass deforestation in those areas and replacing it with new plantings and sustainable forestry, we can begin to reverse the trend toward greater and greater levels of carbon in the atmosphere and reduce the intensity of hurricanes at the same time.
Political inaction on global warming and climate change shares a cause with another crisis, voter apathy in the United States. The average citizen of this country now is more likely to vote in an American Idol competition that a national election.
While laughable, this statistic represents a grave threat to a fundamental principle which underpins our republic.
President Lincoln give it to us very succinctly in the final stanza of his Gettysburg Address: “Government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
If voters deliberately opt out of the political process, either in protest or because they believe that their time on election day is wasted, they diminish the sacrifices of their forebears who fought to give everyone the right to vote and they make it easier for politicians to base their decisions on national TV ratings and poll results rather than healthy discourse with their constituents.
Please visit my next three posts to read how inaction on global warming and voter apathy have a common solution.
Sustainable Justice For All!
Corbett Kroehler
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