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Thought of the month ...

April 2011: Are prayers all that is left to us in mitigating the impact of man-made climate change? Like many other areas in the world, Texas is experiencing the impacts of a climate slowly changing in response to excess emissions of Greenhouse gases and the re-engineering of the planet, which causes unprecedented, extreme conditions in abundance all over the world: In the case of Texas, it is months of a historically unprecedented drought and devastating wildfires that are raging across more than a million acres in this once oil-rich state. What is the Texan decision makers' response? Are they finally joining the lines of those who have been requesting that serious actions are taken to reduce our impact on the planet in order to mitigate climate change? For years, I have carried the hope that eventually unambiguous signs of climate change will line up all of the decision makers in the quest for a sustainable planet and a survival of our civilization. What happened now in Texas renders this hope wishful thinking: The Republican Governor Rick Perry officially declared the days from Good Friday to Easter Sunday (April 22-24, 2011) as “Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas” (read the article). He urges “Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal and robust way of life.”

Can it get any worse than that? Those who had large benefits from a policy of relentless exploitation of fossil fuels and with that are indirectly responsible for the frightening sequence of weather extremes in all parts of the world, have now the guts to pretend that they believe prayers will help to reduce the impacts of climate change. Or is it pure meanness that lets them, in a renaissance of the misleading witchcraft that Ayn Rand saw in religion, use religion to divert people's attention from the true causes of the rapidly accumulating extreme weathers? I tend to believe the latter. We should not think that Governor Rick Perry actually believes that prayers can help to end the drought. But they can help to keep people busy and away from studies of the actual causes of the environmental changes we begin to suffer on our planet. And the perpetrators (again) get away. It might be time for me to read again Wilhelm Reich's Listen, Little Man ...


If you have a story, thought, or picture worth to be considered as story, thought or picture of the month, please feel free to inform me about it by sending an e-mail to hpplag@unr.edu.