Chronicle Editor
Stephen Mpofu, Perspective
THE global village weather conditions have gone berserk at the behest of God’s irresponsible two-legged creatures: us, human beings who now also face the brunt of their actions.
Yes, you guessed right: this Saturday’s discourse is about global warming with thousands of homes and people in Australia cut off by cyclonic floods while here at home jumbos, our tourist attractions have died in Hwange National Park for lack of drinking water with reports of cattle perishing in Matabeleland South province for lack of drinking water while food could knock at the doors of some rural homes for lack of rains especially where villagers rush to grow maize when small grains such as sorghum, rapoko, millet, which the Government is urging farmers to grow under Intwasa/Pfumvudza are drought-tolerant.
The global warming situation appears quite dire and so it behoves on people to desist from irresponsible actions that have resulted in holes being perforated in the blanket, ozone, which shields earth from the sun’s dangerous rays.
Carbon gases spewed into the atmosphere from factory chimneys, coal plants, veld fires and to some extent from refrigerators have and continue to render ozone wafer thin resulting in global warming with perennial droughts and floods the latter in Zimbabwe as experienced from Cyclone Idai which caused floods that destroyed homes and property in the eastern parts of our country with similar floods caused by a cyclone now wreaking havoc in some parts of Australia.
But tragically ironic, humanity persistently ignores the survival message scripted on the back of global warming and this is that the global village population should strictly adhere to the 2016 Paris Agreement on Global Warming from which the United States of America walked out, brazenly ignoring stipulations of the agreement as that super power’s rival countries elsewhere must have followed suit in their own ways with us here in Zimbabwe and elsewhere on the African continent not modifying factory chimneys and/or desisting from wanton destruction of forests for firewood to sell in urban centres and/or to clear woodland for farming or for new homes while hunting with fire in some cases.
Trees absorb and sink carbon gases and so play a very important role in cleansing the atmosphere for human survival.
It therefore becomes imperative for Zimbabweans to take advantage of whatever rains fall and plant more trees across the country.
At the same time alluvial gold panning must be strictly monitored to prevent panners from silting rivers or streams and in the process preventing water flowing downstream for domestic use and for livestock.
In the final analysis, the onus is on us people to weather atrocious weather conditions for our own survival as well as for the survival of future generations and other creatures for which water is a lifeline.
Online Reporter