Huston, we have a problem

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One tiny blue world, one out of trillions of orbs spiraling about in the universe, one. 150,000,000 (km²) (15 billion hectares) is an estimate of the total land surface area of Earth, 45 million are good for farming, 105 million are covered by snow, mountains, are too dry for piratical agriculture, or simply do not have topsoil. 40 million of all of that, the total, are forested, 9.8 billion acres, probably more if it were not for deforestation. About 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers (km³) of water in total, 3,475,000 of that is fresh water with almost 70% of that locked away in ice. 8.7 million species, estimated, of all living things excluding the countless micro-organisms, an estimate because we probably have not studied or are unaware of 80-90% of the total species. A little bit over 7 billion humans. That totals roughly more than half a hectare of forest per person in their 2.14 hectares of land, most of which isn't practically habitable or productive, 131,142,668 gallons of fresh water, most of which cant be used, and one other species per 100 persons even with the mass extinction we are in currently. Big numbers aren't they? Big, rough, numbers here equally distributed amongst everybody equally. But that isn't how the world works, and that is only for the current here and now population. 

(tangent alert)

Figure that most of the fresh water is in some way contaminated, either naturally from minerals, or from out pollution, organic and in organic, at least a billion people don't have “clean water”. Clean water is a strange concept, in developed countries clean water is filled with chemicals, countless chemicals, hundreds that do not have to be recored or reported in the case of municipal water supplies. Not that we could ever have totally pure and distilled water, but “clean water” isn't all that clean, and most of those chemicals have long lives, all the while shortening ours. Consider this, you can pollute waters and just bury them in some old oil well, inject them into the skin of the earth, and the total effect that has on our world water supply is slightly diminished because the water cycles take water from the oceans to the mountains to the watersheds and if not all of it makes it back to the ocean it is none the wiser, for a while. Still then we are left with toxic brews going who knows where, changing in ways we cant monitor. We are still left with this water and one day we will want it, and it will likely still be just as toxic. Tis water will seep into qualifiers, and up into surface waters, some its contaminates will precipitate into silt and clays and rocks, going somewhere yes, but still there, yes still here. When the plans grow there they will take some of those compounds up, and whether for our direct food source or not they can still make it onto the dinner plate through cycles growth and decomposition, spreading with the waters in floods and the natural geological shifts, the wind and food chains. 

Now remember you and your close friends and family have one entire species that is sharing all of that with you, its a tight squeeze isnt it? Now is it fair for them to suffer your pollution? Do I need to mention future human and non-human generations? 

I have considered running away to some distant mountain forest, or Iceland, where I could live simply away from the effects of humans, but its too late for that, the acid rains make their way to every distant peak, the effects of the warming cycles are changing the fragile, once stable, environments, in some instances killing them off completely. There is no way that I could escape the effects, there is no place to go to that is untouched. The message is that there is no escaping this for anybody, the damages will be dealt directly or deceptively, you may not even fathom the connectedness of why you are sick is related to the hydraulic fracturing, fracking, a few states over. The message is we only have one, and all of our actions affect very limited resources, and every action has a reaction, for us, or to someone else in some other time. Actions are like drops of water filling a basin, eventually it overflows if the water doesn't stop.

We can debate if it is the governments responsibility, or the corporations and businesses, the individuals, the education system, or cultures responsibility to effect change and set the precedent, some say it needs to be big, it needs to be technology, it needs to be revolutionary, and while those can all be important, it also does truly matter that the small things happen, or in some cases dont happen. While they seem minuscule like dust compared to a star, a star is only because of dust, and time. The problems we have are all because of small steps taken throughout history intermingled with technology and policy, cultural shifts and what education teaches us, most importantly though it all happened because of personal shifts and individual actions spanning centuries. I can easily find it disheartening that what I am doing doesn't have tangible instant results now, and there may not be any during my life time, but I still change anyway because I am a human, capable of thinking about the future, I have empathy for the present living beings and the ones yet to come, I can understand the our actions now affect our survival rates of the future. We can choose to overflow the basin or create a star.

Waldo