Dear Speaker Pelosi,
I’ve always admired you and supported you with my vote. I now have a very big ask I want of you.
Listen to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and help her in any way you can to make the Green New Deal a reality.
You’re 78 and I’m 73. We won’t have to live in the future that we’ve created for her and her peers, and all those who come after them. They do. We are all living on a rapidly dying planet, and climate change is only part of it. According to the Center for Biological Diversity:
“Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural “background” rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we're now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day.”
We’re losing insect species — we don’t even know how many, except that it’s massive. And they are one of the foundations of our ecosystem. Scientists are just beginning to explore this, and they are very, very alarmed.
According to the Living Planet Report of 2018, issued by the World Wildlife Fund, we’ve already lost 60% of our animal population. And humans, too, are feeling the effects. Not only are the sea creatures dying because of our plastic addiction; babies are being born with plastic inside of them, and, according to studies from the Medical University of Vienna, we are now pooping plastic. This is not good news.
So what I’m asking is that you mentor your new young Congress members and do what the older generations have always done: pass on your wisdom and knowledge of how things work, and let the young ones take that information and apply it to what the younger generations have always brought: their vision and their action. Give them all you can, then let them have the future. It’s up to them. It’s theirs, after all.