By Rev. Robert Plaisted

Guest Column

As I watched a large chunk of greater Los Angeles burn to the ground, it was like looking through a window in time, seeing human civilization as it will appear 20 to 30 years from now.

Much the same can be said about Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which devastated the Southeast last fall, and back-to-back flooding rainstorms that battered the Maine coast last January.

Whenever I write about one of these “thousand-year-disasters,” which now seem to happen every year, I ask the same question, “When will Americans wake up?”

I was stunned by the superficial news coverage. No matter which network I watched, “mainstream” reporters all seemed to have the same objective — find someone to blame. Their questions to local officials usually amounted to, “Do you accept responsibility for this?” Those same questions should have been addressed to the billionaire oligarchs who run fossil fuel corporations. It was clear that corporate reporters weren’t going to touch that idea with a 20-foot pole. Not until six days after the fires broke out, did The New York Times, to its credit, publish a detailed story, linking the Los Angeles catastrophe to our out-of-control climate crisis. A few other papers slowly followed.

We already knew what to expect from Fox News and its cheesy imitators. Blame California’s Democratic government, regardless of facts. Smear local officials to distract the public from the corporate big shots who bear prime responsibility. Rupert Murdoch’s flagship Wall Street Journal headlined its feature story, “California’s Wildfire Climate Excuse.” That’s a lie, and they know it.

To those who still think this is some kind of power game, I have really bad news for you. If it is a power game, we’ve already lost. If we were stupid enough to pit our puny human efforts against the eternal strength of Earth, that was like pitting a mosquito against an elephant. It was no contest from the beginning. Human civilization took the one-way street to collapse.

If the history of this era is written by honest historians, they will conclude that the greatest mistake Homo sapiens ever made was inventing capitalism. It’s a system that exists to plunder Earth of its natural resources, convert them into money, and then stuff that money into our pockets. Our second great mistake was allowing corporations to become the dominant force in human society. Organizations that exist primarily to shovel money to stockholders never will prioritize the best interests of ordinary citizens. Corporatism is killing us, slowly but surely.

As the sun slowly vanishes into the permanent pall of wildfire smoke, we have a choice. We can keep trying to hold onto our dying way of life, until it dies, and we die with it. Or, we can wise up and start living the way we always were intended to live in this world. Through our folly, we’ve left nature no choice but to call in our outstanding loans. Those long-overdue back payments for all the resources we squandered during the last 400 years of corporate capitalism are now due and payable in full.

The Adam and Eve story remains the foundational tale of our Judeo-Christian tradition. God gave us life in a beautiful garden, where all our needs were provided. We ruined our Eden here on Earth, where our civilization grew and flourished for 11,000 years. Now, we have to decide whether we’ll continue to screw things up, until God heaves us out of the garden forever.

Rev. Robert Plaisted is a retired United Methodist clergyman, formerly of Bridgton and Bath, now residing in Auburn.