Dylon Harrison
Interim Editor-in-Chief
It seems that lately, you can’t go a day without hearing about the fires raging in Australia. So much of Australia has burned that the country is beginning to resemble an ISU owned housing complex.
These fires highlight some major issues that we as humanity desperately need to address.
Firstly, our priorities are severely misplaced. When Notre Dame burned, it took only a few hours to raise hundreds of millions of dollars.
Meanwhile, an entire country is burning. The bush fires have been an issue since September and in that time, only an estimated $67 million have been raised.
I’m not saying that Notre Dame wasn’t an important landmark, and I’m not saying that people haven’t been generous in their giving of money to help in Australia.
It just seems to me that our society shouldn’t care more about a fire at a church, in which nobody was hurt, than it does about an entire continent burning down.
I also believe that the reactions to the Australian fires have done an excellent job of highlighting the difference in levels of compassion between the economic classes.
If this sounds like a bit of a stretch, consider this. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, donated $690,000 to the relief efforts. This seems like a large individual donation, until you realize that he made more money than that every five minutes in 2018.
His “generous” donation has been beaten several times. Metallica donated $750,000. Bezos was even out-donated by a social media influencer, now known as the Naked
Philanthropist, who had managed to raise more than $700,000 in donations to Australia by selling naked pictures of herself.
The biggest takeaway from these fires, that you can’t really write about what’s happening in Australia without discussing, is the need for action against climate change.
I know that these days we can’t go a week without hearing someone talk about climate change and how we need to do something to combat it, but there’s a good reason for that. THE EARTH IS LITERALLY ON FIRE.
Habitats are being lost. Animals that aren’t found anywhere else on the planet are being forced off their land. Thousands of animals have been killed since the fires started in 2019. The damage has gotten so bad that koalas have now been pushed to the edge of extinction.
We’re losing our planet, and as cliche as this must sound, we don’t have another one to go to. I won’t pretend to have the solution to the climate crisis. I doubt anyone has a solid solution, but we need to do something.
I know this column can come off as depressing, but that isn’t my intention in writing it. My goal in writing this is to light a fire, pun intended, under anyone reading it.
Each of us can make a difference. Donate, find ways to go green and do what you can to make the world a better place, because Earth needs all of us to step up.
