Our smartphones chime us awake, the coffee maker bubbles and drips as we take our morning shower, the car starts, and we drive to work, come home and relax in our favourite chair, and 3 billion birds missing goes unnoticed to all but the bird enthusiast.

Sitting in a chair designed in Sweden, sipping our coffee grown in Colombia, reading a tweet on a smartphone manufactured in China, it is ridiculous to imagine that climate change won’t affect you.

Should we be so reliant on each other? That ship has sailed, the genie is out of the bottle. We ARE reliant on each other, and have been for thousands and thousands of years. As humanity moved across the planet, so have our goods, our food, our ideas, and today that interchange is so interwoven that the breeze of a butterflies wings on the other side of the world does, and will, affect each one of us.

Perhaps Carl Sagan said it best, we are all at the mercy of momentary masters of a portion of a dot. Our lives, our breath, our legacy, is here, can only be here, for here is all we have.

And here is a little factoid to munch on, in the time that I’ve been alive, just over 50 years, almost 3 billion birds have disappeared from the North American continent.

There are some who would destroy our only home, and our energy sucking interdependence is a juggernaut, and we ARE all one.

This super organism of technology that feeds us, houses us, clothes us, this juggernaut of garbage and glory, it is our greatest achievement, but it has become our greatest foe.

Right or left, white or black, male or female, climate activist or warmonger, it is that one element we all share, beneath all our feet.

As greed and corruption around the world destroy fragile ecosystems, Joe blow continues to whistle while he works. Oh, but, some giant old Cathedral in France burns and Joe blows a gasket.

Some may prefer to take the word of a pundit whose pay cheque comes from a fossil fuel giant on Fox News, over that of a 16-year old whose passion for this planet had her sitting every Friday in protest in front of her Parliament in Sweden, and you know what? This IS all wrong.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Carl Sagan |  Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Notice how many right wing science deniers know this young girls name? She threatens them with facts and figures, with her passion and her drive. Her movement of climate activists are making waves, and that right there is beautiful to behold.

Honestly, watching her speak brings tears to my eyes. Her courage and her passion is exactly what is needed in this sometimes harsh and brutal world.