Silent Warnings

Each time I hear of an environmental catastrophe, Chernobyl comes to my mind. How ironic that something occurring even before my own birth should be so close to me, a shadow over the present. The more I read, the more I understand that it was not one explosion in one location. It was about people ignoring warnings for too long.

The same outrage is experienced today in other forms. Cities all around the world are inhaling dirty air, consuming dirty water, and having factories or dumping grounds next to them because no one wants to solve the issue. And as in most cases, here as well it's often the poor and weaker segments of society that bear the largest cost.

What catches me off guard and leaves me in my tracks is that disasters don't necessarily result from accidents. They result from negligence. They result from powerful individuals making a decision to look the other way, or all of us as a society acting like the issue isn't now.

Chernobyl taught us what occurs when safety doesn't come first. Now we're apparently getting a second warning, but this time it's stealthy but no less important. It's in sea-level rise, it's in extreme weather, and it's in the voices of communities trying to be heard about access to clean water. It's not a warning given with one, big, loud bang, but with a low, persistent hum. It's something that we can hear only if we'll get quiet and listen.

If we're not vigilant, if we just keep passing the buck, then history will repeat itself. We might not have another nuclear meltdown, but we can have ecosystems ravaged and communities displaced. The threat is not in one incident but in the slow, insidious loss of that which we used to take for granted.

I will not let us dream of the devastated world and empty cities as our fate. We can prevent that, but first we have to hear these muffled cries.