Support the Earth

50 years ago, I was an excited, enthralled 8-year-old lying on the carpet in front of a ghostly, grainy image as humans stepped onto the lunar surface. I was all in. I had a Saturn V model, and knew every stage, and all about the mission these brave men were undertaking to crown the almost un-human 10-year spurt of technological and scientific advancement to be standing at that doorstep of accomplishment. I don’t expect another moment of such historic import to occur in the rest of my lifetime.

I have visited the Kennedy Space Center, and on the tour I stood in the tiny control room of Alan Shepard’s first Mercury shot, stood beneath the remains of the Apollo 8 launchpad where three men died a few hundred feet above, next to a full-size Saturn rocket — the most amazing vehicle humans had ever built — and looked upon an unremarkable underground silo casing, where we were told the bits of the Challenger were quietly interred.

So as a 58-year-old, with children who will inherit this Earth in a heartbeat, just like my generation is receiving it now from my parents’ generation, I cannot truly express how dumbfounded and frustrated I am at the lack of progress we as a country, the very same that put those astronauts on the Moon, have made in solving the greatest scientific challenge we face – the preservation of the very planet we adventured from.

This is not even a question for sane minds. The overwhelming scientific evidence points to human cause of climate alteration. Even if you have doubts, why in all that is holy would you not want to support the protection of our home? Yet we have an administration that has wiped the words “climate change” from government websites and preaches expansion of 19th Century energy practices.

Where is our leadership? Where is our bold vision to return our Earth to full health? Why would you support anyone who denied that?

Search the photo, Earthrise, taken on an early Apollo mission. You’ve seen it before. Why would you not be passionate about preserving that place, at any monetary cost? I can assure you that the 50 years between that boy on the carpet to this older man writing this goes by in a flash. And in 50 more years, I hope my 72-year-old daughter and 70-year-old son will be as proud of the saving of our world as I am of Apollo 11.

Steve Heinke

Snoqualmie

Give climate change national attention

Marching with Democrats in the 2012 Mt. Si Festival Parade, the surprise of the day was gubernatorial candidate Jay Inslee showing up to walk with us the entire route. This provided each of us in our small group with an opportunity to participate in conversation with him about the issues. I’ll never forget his brief comments about our part in causing global warming, the science proving it beyond a reasonable doubt, damage already done and his passionate concern for future generations of life on earth if more dramatic steps were not taken soon nationally and globally to deal with the situation. He was already a visionary on the subject.

Since then there has been little progress globally taking those steps, and nationally our current president’s administration has been systematically dismantling steps taken in the past. And Inslee has continued to be a prophet as the cycle of heat waves, drought, wild fires, flooding and cyclones inches upward in severity — not to mention the unstoppable human migrations of desperate peoples including thousands coming here to escape the impact of climate change on their homelands.

Now Inslee is taking his passion a step further by becoming a candidate for U. S. President with climate change as his signature issue. This is giving him a platform to place global warming front and center before our electorate as an existential disaster in the making for life on earth as we experience it now. He and his supporters rightly continue to pursue demands for more attention including debate on the subject as a contribution to reawakening our nation to the dangers we face if we don’t.

David Olson

Issaquah