In 1991, a popular radio program ‘Harris in the Morning’ sponsored a contest regarding the growing threat of worldwide global warming.  DJ Paul Harris asked listeners to urge the United Nations to preserve Earth’s rain forests, critical to curtailing climate change. At that time, devastating global warming looked to peak 100 years in the future. A few meteorologists, however, forecast a growing greenhouse effect that would trap hot air in Earth’s atmosphere, leading to burgeoning severe weather events in just 30 years. Now, 32 years later, heated atmosphere has triggered the worst forest fires, destructive flooding, and record soaring temperatures worldwide, empirical evidence that global warming is upon us.

        Considering this “existential” threat as the advent of regular patterns of general destruction, I thought it might be worthwhile to post my entry to Paul Harris’s Saving the Rain Forests contest. I didn’t win back in 1991. Let us hope we all win by acting to save Earth and our future.

Save the Rain Forests

        Save the rain forests, save the world. Save the human world; give hope of need fulfilled beyond a day; of children as love’s luxury, not labor; of enough to eat from a small, well-nurtured yard; of land, trees, and creatures as moment of beauty, not opportunity. Cajole good-naturedly the rich to invest in the poor; tax countries to give the means and ways to preserve glorious things for glory alone; cite the waste of power and commend austerity for the sake of others. Save the human world; save the rain forests; save the world.