I am encouraged to find out from Dana Milbank’s Commentary on Aug. 27 that post-civil-rights rebels are looking for a unifying cause.

May I suggest the crisis that Bill Moyers, my personal hero, calls, “the crisis that makes all other crises irrelevant” — climate change. This is the process that makes storms more deadly and droughts more intense, acidifies the oceans, disrupts the food chain and affects more than half all living species, including our own.

There is plenty to do — conservation, innovation and education — and there’s hope of slowing the process if everyone pulls together. There is also the added bonus of thumbing our collective noses at Big Oil, including the company with the world’s deepest pockets, Exxon-Mobil. That company has spread doubt about the reality of climate change and its human origins (a fact backed by overwhelming scientific evidence) and has tried to intimidate legitimate climate scientists. It also uses its vast profits to buy influence in Congress, resulting in exemptions from environmental regulations so that trillions of gallons of clean ground water, that ever-scarcer commodity, could be contaminated during the fracking process.

Rebels, however, take pride in playing David to bullying Goliaths, and we all know who won that first battle!

Melanie Lanctot

Readfield


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