Juxtaposed to exponentially increasing global environmental problems are the recent expeditions by NASA’s twin robot geologists, “Opportunity” and “Spirit,” the Mars Exploration Rovers that have been launched in search of answers about the history of water on Mars. Not only are these $810 million robotic tin cans making an even larger dent in the United States’ catastrophically anorexic budget, they are also posing as a pathetic distraction for the Bush administration to ignore the critical problems facing our planet here and now.
Who cares if we can go and live on Mars within the next century? We can’t even take care of the planet we’ve got; how can we consider colonizing a new one? According to environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of the Natural Resources Defense Council, this administration has put the state of nature in serious peril.
If you’ve read his article, “Crime Against Humanity,” in Rolling Stone magazine, it may be the only piece of pre-election literature you’ll need before deciding that this administration needs to be launched like the Mars rovers – far away from anything to do with the future of the free world. With only one mention of the environment in the State of the Union speech, Bush seems to have become good at one thing – creating a virtual free-for-all attack upon Mother Nature – while disillusioning the public with the possibility of one day living on Mars.
By allowing the oil, coal, power and automotive industries to become the experts of environmental policies during the last four years, 31 out of 48 members of Bush’s petroleum-drunk cronies have once again lined their pockets with profit at the expense of the atmosphere, water, animals and nonrenewable resources. One of the most prevalent issues being ignored is global warming. The Bush administration has attempted to discredit a virtual scientific consensus blaming industrial emissions for global warming. The National Academy of Sciences confirmed the existence of global warming and its connection to industrial greenhouse gases for the administration, but no one listened.
The NAS estimates that global temperatures will rise between 2.5 degrees and 10.4 degrees by 2100, which will cause coastal towns such as Boston, New York and Los Angeles to drown in the overflow of the ocean. It is a known fact that the United States uses a disproportionate amount of all the world’s natural resources and pollutes at an outstanding rate compared to other countries.
Compared to China, we emit 17,000 more kilograms of carbon dioxide and consume 6,000 more kilograms per capita of energy per year. China has more than eight times our population and engages in just as much factory production as the United States. The imbalance is obvious, but somehow America thinks it has some special privilege to continue raping the resources of Mother Nature without any reprimand. Along with global warming, pollution continues to skyrocket, entire species of animals get closer to extinction every day and acid rain continues to destroy lakes, forests and mountain ranges across the country forever.
Often it seems that anyone who cares about the environment has to be a sprout-munching peace demonstrator and isn’t a creditable source about which issues are important to humanity. Well, that is a cheap way to evade a huge problem that affects everyone. We all breathe the air and drink the water; we all need to take responsibility to save the planet’s resources, before it’s too late.
There are solutions to these problems. The genocide must stop. We cannot go spending $810 million on sending NASA rovers to Mars without caring for the planet we live on. It’s not that I am against NASA, space exploration or discovering the unknown, but I am against the unreasonable exploitation of resources that we can never retrieve. So, unless you plan on being able to survive on water-based fossils and living in scorching hot temperatures, you should forget about joining the Bush administration’s
vacation to Mars and start thinking about the future of this planet. Consider the words of Chief Seattle in 1854: “Humankind did not weave the web of life. We are but one thread within it.” Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
-The writer is a freshman majoring in journalism.
