Now one is sure that people have really realized that reckoned at least from the turn of this century, Mother Nature has lost her patience with the ways mankind has abused her given bounty.
And despite man's growing awareness, though grudging, of the inevitability of climate change or global warming, the efforts to control it, or at least to minimize the overly fast damage pace, are very puny and hugely wanting.
Imagine the paradox, that the world's superpower in almost all aspects of culture and power, Uncle Tom's USA, and the number 1 in greenhouse gas emission, appears hardly concerned in mitigating the global climate phenomenon. Just lately though, China has taken over the ignominy of the topmost country in carbon gas emission.
The fact remains that USA. has yet to sign the Kyoto Protocol for the world countries to address the global warming. The flimsy reason is that doing so would adversely affect its economy, plus its insistence to let poor developing countries be, likewise, Kyoto signatories.
The Cebuano stilted vulgarism that "the foolishness of man goes home to his body" seems sensical, and even sagacious, inre man's abuses and virtual rape of Nature.
Let's tick off in passing how mankind mistreats Nature with rapacity… For long a time the outerspace has been bombarded with CO2 gas emissions splintering so many millions of square miles of the ozone layer. On Earth's surface, mountains have been destroyed and hills leveled for so-called development and progress, like indiscriminate mining, posh subdivisions and uphill housing. Undersea coastal regions reclaimed for industrial expansion, and seabeds drilled with concrete and log piles destroying the natural stability. Rivers and inland waterways, as well as gorges being dammed and constricted, adversely affecting their natural flow. And the bowels of the desert and the ocean seabeds disturbed and destroyed by series of bomb testing, aside from those exploded in outerspace.
All these and more virtual "rapes" of Nature, all God's creations for mankind's own bounty, have resulted in cataclysms, catastrophes and countless deaths and destructions of apocalyptic proportions. All these and more ginormous debacles equal what man now calls the pernicious effects of climate change or global warming. And which former US Vice-President Al Gore has long warned mankind, as, the "inconvenient truth", a stupendous understatement.
And so, mankind now inexorably reaps whatever the supposedly intelligent homo-sapiens have carelessly sowed for long…
Just for ready recall in passing, Nature is hitting back… There was the wrath of Nature of the December 26 "tsunami" a couple of years back drowning thousands of our Asian neighbors; the titanic Hurricane "Katrina" inundating New Orleans; the cycle of tornadoes and thunderstorms raking the U.S. Mid-west; the brushfires and forest burning of wide swaths in various countries and places, including the Hollywood vicinity; the earthquakes in different places, like Guinsaugon, Southern Leyte and the recent one in Sichuan, China that tolled more than 80,000 dead; the cyclone in Burma/Myanmar; the typhoons and flash floods in the Philippines and other ASEAN countries; and still many other calamities worldwide.
European and African regions, and practically all parts of the globe have not been spared from Nature's anger. In fact, flooding, typhoons, droughts, extreme heat and extreme cold, and the irregular cycle of the climate that used to be regular and cyclical vagaries that the industrial and agricultural sectors would observe, among others, have gone awry. Even the polar bears, as ecological and environmental experts have reportedly observed, have found it difficult to make do with their ultra-changing habitat.
* * *
Email: lparadiangjr@yahoo.com