What Might Have Been

The Bach/Gounod Ave Maria is a paean to the Virgin Mary, beseeching forgiveness for sins committed unto death. The sins against people, and against life on earth. That which we could have forestalled, in grace as put forth in Laudato Si, to protect and care for our home.

Hail, Mary, full of grace
the lord is with thee,
blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus
pray for us sinners, now, and at
the hour of our death.

Not that the effort wasn't made in the USA. The Bernie Sanders program and policy on Climate Change issues, incorporated into the DNC platform in July of this year was to drastically cut carbon pollution, create a clean energy workforce, and impose a carbon tax. The Democratic platform ultimately called for a WWII-Scale Mobilization to solve the climate crisis, which involved the leadership of Bill McKibben in framing the platform.

Yet that was not to be. So, on Dec. 13, 2016 about 400 scientists and environmental activists gathered at Jessie Square Outside Moscone Center in San Francisco to stand up to Trump's position on climate change:

Science is under attack. President-elect Donald Trump is packing his cabinet with unapologetic climate change deniers with close ties to the fossil fuel industry. Last week, Trump falsely claimed that “nobody really knows” if climate change is happening, and then a member of his transition team actually compared modern climate science to the Flat-earth theory.  He has also made it clear that he wants to hand over our public lands and waters to the fossil fuel industry.

And in an unprecedented move, the Trump transition team sent out a questionnaire seeking the names of federal employees who helped implement President Obama’s climate change goals -- a move some called a witch hunt. Meanwhile, climate scientists are furiously working to archive public data because of the concern that it all could be erased under the incoming Trump administration.

Scientists aren’t usually ones to rally in the streets. As Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, said at the rally, "We don't want to be here...we want to be in our labs, we want to be in the field, doing the work that we were trained and educated to do...We are at a moment in time, a moment in history, where we have to do something else as well. And that's stand up and be counted."

So we stand on the edge of a tragic precipice, from which we don't seem to have the ability to engage our vision or embrace our humanity.

Updates 12/26/16:

An open letter to President-Elect Trump and the 115th Congress was sent by more than 2,300 scientists, Nov. 30, 2016

In the aftermath of the election results, a group of 500 women in the sciences has banded together to speak out, Nov. 17, 2016

376 members of the National Academy of Sciences published an open letter to draw attention to the serious risks of climate change, Sept. 20, 2016

Update 12/29/16: Are Climate Scientists Ready for Trump? Maybe not.

Update 12/31/16: Scientists at the plenary session of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican on Nov 29, 2016