We have only 10 days to the official start of spring, but it sure seems like we're at summer already. This past week the remodel of the Loews hotel pool deck was completed, and it was instantly filled with hotel guests seeking refuge from the harsh winter weather across the country.
As our rainy season comes to a close we are in yet another year of a severe drought, and local authorities continue to remind us that we need to conserve water in the face of a coming water rationing plan across the state. The irony is that soon the East Coast and the Midwest will be swimming in the melted snows of winter. It's sad that we as a nation haven't figured out a system to preserve the winter waters and re-distribute them across the country.
Since California provides such a large percentage of the foodstuffs to the country, and the world, you would think that there would be a concerted effort to provide our farmers with enough water to continue. However, the reality is that there is no system in place yet to create reservoirs and reroute water to where it is needed.
Many of the greatest minds of our time do agree that climate change is something that man has had a hand in exacerbating, if not outright causing.
I know it seems a bit "Chicken Little"-like to be concerned about what could just be anomalies in the weather that will equalize out over the course the next 100 years. If it turns out that climate change is just an anomaly, then any actions we take to address it would be moot. On the one hand, they also could provide us with a much stronger country and a better global food supply system in any case.
I believe that we should be attacking the problems of climate change, whether real or not, in such a way that even if it isn't a long-term problem, we end up with more and better resources to provide for the planet. It seems to me that we could approach this problem in the same way that we approached sending a man to the moon. We didn't know we could do it, but we believed we could and then we did it. Out of that tremendous effort, when we had far fewer intellectual resources at our disposal, we developed new technologies that have enhanced all of our lives today.
The tasks before us could be the rallying cry for technological innovation that remakes our world in a tremendously positive way. The oceans are in crisis, from over fishing, acidification and the pollution of plastics - all of which we can theoretically fix with technology and a global effort.
It is by educating the globe that we can affect the changes we need. We are on the verge of being able to communicate with 99 percent of the planet on a regular basis through the use of television, radio, cell phones and the Internet. The use of technology to communicate with the planet is what will fix the problems; once we share the facts with enough people, we will be able to increase the recycling that needs to be done in countries such as China and India and across the African continent.
If you think that it cannot happen, then you need to be aware that even in countries like China, which has strong and powerful censorship habits, the people are waking to the conditions in our world. I was listening to KCRW this past week and they were discussing the documentary "Under the Dome," which addresses the issues of environmental pollution in China. It was seen by more than 100 million people before the government took the documentary offline. Their environmental protection minister Chen Jining has said the movie "has an important role in promoting public awareness of environmental health issues." Copies still exist online and the movie is available on YouTube.
What happens in China possibly is having a long-term effect here. NASA has an animation that shows how China's fossil fuel usage is causing our longer, colder winters. As a planet we need to come to the realization that what happens in part of the planet can and does have an effect on another part of the planet because we are in a metaphorical giant glass snow globe.
It is once we as a planet learn that we are all fundamentally interconnected that we will finally address our communal problems. I hope it happens soon.
David Pisarra is a Los Angeles divorce and child custody lawyer specializing in fathers' and men's rights with the Santa Monica firm of Pisarra & Grist. He welcomes your questions and comments. He can be reached at dpisarra@pisarra.com or (310) 664-9969. You can follow him on Twitter @davidpisarra.
