Heresy Snowboarding

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** Original post 4 March 2009; updated 6th March 2009.
Steve Kimball aka Johnny Rook, has slipped from the Earth. Please consider donating to his memorial fund at 350.org which helps fight climate change (check out 350.org, it’s a great site).

RIP to a passionate, earnest environmentalist. We need more of them.

**
Original post

One of the most caring, passionate climate bloggers/environmentalists, is dying.

Johnny Rook (Steve), who publishes The Climaticide Chronicles, is dying from what sounds like leukemia. Here is a man who really, really, cares about the world and saving it. In a post, My Doctor Doesn’t think I’m going to die today, he says:

But something else happened too: the world became more poignant to me. I’d always thought of myself as a caring, empathetic, compassionate person, but now I found suffering, cruelty, and abuse to be intolerable regardless of the form it took. Debeaked hens crammed into tiny cages and stacked in factory-farm warehouses, infants shaken to death by their parents because they wouldn’t stop crying, genocide in Darfur, my countrymen in Appalachia and on the Gulf Coast treated as if they lived in a Third World Country, Iraqis bombed by us and by Al Qaeda… It was all too much. I was feeling the world’s pain.

About his thoughts, he says:

My diaries, as those of you who are regular readers know, often contain depressing information about how temperatures and sea levels are rising, how sea ice and glaciers are melting and shrinking, how deserts are growing and heat waves becoming longer and hotter meaning that agriculture is becoming less and less possible in many places, how extreme weather is becoming more common and more intense, how oceans are becoming acidified, how species are going extinct, ecosystems are being rendered uninhabitable for the creatures that live in them, and how famine and diseases are spreading.

When I write about solutions I often focus on how people and governments are mostly oblivious to what is happening and to how little time we have left to act boldly and forcefully to effect the radical change that the scientists tell us is necessary. I agree absolutely with what what Steven Chu, the new Secretary of Energy told the LA Times in an interview a couple of days ago.

I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen.

I understand that such news can depress. At times it depresses me but, more than anything else, it has filled my life with meaning. I have a mission. Before I die, I want to have some sense that this beautiful planet that has provided the context for my life, will have some chance of enduring. I want to die with hope, believing that my teenage son and his children and your children and their children will live in a world that is reasonably hospitable to human beings.

I don’t know how that can happen if people will not face the reality of what is taking place in the world. So, I continue to sound the alarm, even though I know that most of what I write is discounted as alarmist or simply ignored as too uncomfortable to deal with.

Joe Romm over at ClimateProgress.org said it best when he said:

So there is hope as long as people like Johnny Rook are willing to use their energy — even their last drop of energy — to tell the world what is to come on our current path and how we can stop it.

This is what Heresy is about. We actually don’t care if we don’t sell anything, we just want to save our winter and world. That’s it. Nothing else matters to us.

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