To the Editor:

As I look up to a sky hazed with the smoke of unrelenting wildfires that have been burning for months across the breadth of Canada, and as I learn of triple digit heat dome days stifling a tier of southern states, I could ask: am I or the world dreaming a nightmare?

No, neither I nor the world is dreaming, but the nightmare is the disastrous reality of Capitalism that rules all policy decisions everywhere.

Corporate investment is wed to the extractive pillage of natural resources, in continuing support of modes of industry, modes of transportation, energy generation, even the high energy demand needed to support our modern communication, which are guaranteeing that planetary climate changes will be our greatest danger, in less than two decades.

Corporate profitability is embedded in the present portfolio of investments.

Corporate power rules governments, and shapes public policy.

Populations everywhere will be in jeopardy of massive social disruptions and breakdown of services. We already see global refugee tsunamis.

Our means of livelihood will be at risk. Agencies that are called upon to insure/fund recovery and reconstruction after fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, will experience such incessant demand upon their resources that they will end bankrupt. We already see the escalating costs.

But major shifts in global investment and consumption paradigms are not occurring. Even as straightforward a step as an immediate halt to deforestation throughout the world, is not contemplated by any government.

Households like my own make modest consumption choices and maximum recycling efforts, yet this will have no effect upon what is coming ... a mega disaster demands mega prevention policies.

We, and individuals everywhere, are still caught in the grasp of greed, inertia and willful disbelief. Nothing less than a nations-wide revolution in perception will put the urgency of this oncoming catastrophe on our front burner (ahead of wars, ahead of conveniences, ahead of business as usual, ahead of profit) and force revolutionary amendments to the present ways in which we are assaulting the health of our world.

Polly Brody

Southbury