This morning I heard that the Sandisfield pipeline is set to go right by a beaver pond that hosts a Great Blue Heron rookery, full of heron mothers sitting on nests right now.

When a pipeline like that goes through, we can see the disruption to big species like trees and herons, beavers and frogs. We can’t even fathom the disruption that happens at the root level. And should there be a rupture, the entire ecosystem would be blown away.

And yet Nature is so resilient. I often remind myself, when I get upset about tree cutting, that every beautiful meadow in my surroundings was once a rocky forest. Change is not always bad, and meadows are as valuable as woods—just ask any owl.

But building pipelines in 2017…that is just stupid. I can’t say I’m happy to see forests cleared for solar fields either, but at least this is relatively clean energy that doesn’t endanger the earth and water with the potential for dirty oil or gas spills.

Investing in fossil fuel infrastructure at this late date in human history makes no sense. Despite the Heartland Institute’s efforts to sow lies about climate change, it’s real, and it’s already, as Bill McKibben warned us years ago, changing our planet from the one we were born on to.

The planet has seen such shifts before. Iconic species that once called this place home have vanished into extinction. Life on the planet has continued.

What has never happened before, as far as I am aware, is that a super-intelligent species like humans, knowing full well the causes and effects of our actions, willfully triggered climate change so dramatic that it brought about mass extinctions—and not just of companion species, but of we humans ourselves.

Alberta CA tar sands

That is what we are doing when we continue to allow fossil fuel extraction, with all the fossil fuel burning necessary to get it to market and more burning. We are committing planetary murder-suicide, ecocide on a vast scale.

If we must go down into the night of extinction, I pray we do not so thoroughly contaminate the planet that regeneration will be impossible.

Are we capable of that? Could our nuclear weapons and reactors, our chemical poisons and our plastics render this planet inhospitable to life?

I don’t want our descendants to find out the answer to this the hard way. It’s a simulation worth casting, just so those in power have their eyes fully opened to the future that could be.

When Scrooge was visited by the Ghosts of Past and Present, he was able to laugh off the sad visions they showed him, albeit uneasily. It was the nightmare scenarios presented by the Ghost of the Future that got him to change his ways, in a hurry.

I know that as a sad Cassandra my visions don’t carry much weight. But when our scientists show us, over and over again, the absolute necessity of shifting to renewable energy quickly—QUICKLY—or resigning ourselves to going down in the general ecocide of the planet, how can the lords of industrial capitalism continue to play dumb? How can they continue to build those pipelines, extract those tar sands, drill in our precious oceans?

How can we, who are aware, continue to let them have their way with us and the Earth we love?

See you at the Climate Marches tomorrow, people.

For the Earth!