Point of View: It’s Just Us

You need no further evidence as to the extent of global warming than the hot air given off in the Republican candidates’ “debates.”

That alone ought to raise the earth’s temperature by perhaps as much as 2 degrees.

These man-made emissions will mean the sea level will rise even more and sooner than expected, threatening the G.O.P. base’s castles in the sand. And, of course, the world’s riparian poor, whose accommodations are less substantial, will be swept away as the waters trickle up.

Trickle-down economic theory plus the trickle-up consequences of environmental missteps, then, ought to restore balance to the food chain and relieve the pressure that overpopulation has put on our precious resources.

“. . . You take exception to this exceptionalism, you say? I’m sorry, the borders are closed, no demurrals may pass through my cranial checkpoint. Seek asylum for your ‘buts’ elsewhere. . . .”

Well, enough imaginings provoked by closed minds — one of the worst threats to life on earth that there is at the moment.

If peace of mind cannot be achieved collectively speaking, then our species is at great risk. Five major extinctions have been said to have occurred in eons past. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the sixth, rather than caused by meteor strikes or volcanic activity, were owing to closed minds.

Only together can we reverse the trend, by championing diversity and creativity and an egalitarian spirit rather than the evil of nihilism and its attendant propaganda, which often is cloaked as the word of God.

Bernie Sanders is right when he says it all began with our invasion of Iraq. It opened Pandora’s box.

“Hope was the only good the casket had held among the many evils,” Edith Hamilton wrote of it in her “Mythology.”

“And it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in misfortune.”

Yet we cannot rely on justice descending from on high. In the end, it’s just us, it’s just up to us.