By Isaac Winter ’20
Staff Writer
The animals of America released a statement earlier this week regarding their position on climate change in response to the report released by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change saying that governments have 10 years to make “‘unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to save the world from climate change.
In full, their statement reads: “We, the animals of America, are tired of being fetishized by the American public—not just by our captivity in zoos across the country, but digitally as well—where a sneezing panda becomes a YouTube sensation and cute dogs, cats, and birds populate every human’s Instagram feed. We’re appealing to everyone about climate change except white (mostly Republican) men because we know these men (especially those on the Senate Judiciary Committee) don’t take in any of their five senses when they vote or work on legislation in Congress. Instead, they use two other senses—their beer guts and their d*cks. They vote for the d*cks because boners and donors keep their re-election campaigns well-funded. They vote for the d*cks because males rule almost all aspects of America, and they know that they’re in danger of becoming endangered soon.”
What does that have to do with climate change? All of us are close to becoming endangered unless we come together and save our planet. We animals support clean, renewable energy. Ever since the later decades of the 19th century, when canaries started being used by American mining companies to detect whether a mine’s conditions were dangerous, we have supported moving on from coal as a major producer of gas. For the past 32 years, we’ve celebrated Canary Day every December 30 when canaries stopped being placed in British mines in 1986. Needless to say, canaries can’t survive toxic gas any better than humans can.
While we appreciate that Mother Nature has been immortalized by poets and artists for centuries, we do not want that to be the planet’s sole legacy. We implore all Americans to help their fellow humans and animals by embracing the wonderment that Mother Nature has to offer before it’s too late and humans start thinking of making colonies on Mars (which we imagine will not be populated by animals except domestic cats, dogs, gerbils, and fish).
To those who believe in a deity or a superior being, we have an inkling that your gods did not envision an Earth that could bake itself to death. When your deity or supreme being created Earth, they imagined it as a place where you and your fellow congregants could worship this deity or supreme being until the rest of recorded history. To those who worship their technology in some way, do some due diligence and take an hour out of your life to research how the world will end before the iPhone MCMXCIX debuts. To those who smoke marijuana, this is a no-brainer. To everyone else, save the planet because this is the only one we have where humans and animals coexist semi-peacefully.
Isaac Winter can be reached at winterij@mx.lakeforest.edu.
