It is easy to be so caught up in local issues that the bigger picture is out of sight. Of all the local issues that fill our time – roads, rates and taxes, jobs, marine parks, sewerage schemes, etc – it is the safety and welfare of families, of children and grandchildren, of the elderly and even the unborn, which most affects us all. This is a universal human condition, a global concern, and at the local level everyone is affected by wider global events.
If you were told of a real threat to the safety and welfare of your community, what would you do? Wait for it to happen?
If your child was playing cricket in the street and you heard the sirens and noise of an approaching police chase, what would you do? Wait to see if it came down your street?
But that is just what the world of people is doing right now. Wait and see. For right now the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Fire, Flood, Famine and Pestilence, are gearing up with their old buddy War for the event of the millennium, a 1.5 degree C rise in Earth’s temperature.
Doomsayer? Scaremongering? Another “The World ends Tomorrow” nut?
It is clear and true that the Arctic icecap is melting rapidly, perhaps beyond the point of no return. Greenland, home of the largest northern ice mass, has experienced melting across 97% of its surface. The immediate effect, during my lifetime, will be rising sea levels; if all of Greenland melts, way over 6 metres.
It is not just the coastal devastation that this will bring right around the world; in the worst scenario the Earth will become, through a severe Greenhouse effect, another Venus, untenable for life.
World Governments have not come to grips with this, and because of their relationships with corporate business, organisations whose muscle and wealth outweigh that of individual countries, they will be very slow to act… unless… unless there is a vast movement of the people of this planet to push for dramatic, drastic action regardless of personal loss.
It only takes a few individuals to start the snowball. Will you step outside the box, get out of your comfort zone, and for the future of your kids and grandkids take up the banner? get on Facebook? tweet on Twitter? demand World Government action? tell your kids the truth? for they are a most powerful weapon on the internet, and it’s their future!
Or will you wait and see, consigning them and the rest of the human world to misery, even oblivion?

Scott McDonald
“The Wallaby Run”
Pelican Lagoon
Kangaroo Island