Fire on the Mountain

This photo bears repeating....if for no other reason than it will replace the raunchy wrap from Senegal as the first image people see when they link to the blog these days!

It's the picture of the peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Meru that I took a few weeks ago, on the way back from Arusha. It was taken from the window of a plane, so it's kind of blurry and indistinct, but you can still see some streaks of snow and ice on Kilimanjaro's peak. Well, this morning, there was a BBC report suggesting that in 20 years, all the snow and glaciers atop Mt. K may be gone, zapped by global warming.

Now, I don't pretend to be an expert on climate change, or an impassioned enviromentalist. But I just don't understand why it's so hard to get consensus on the fact that we have completely fucked our planet's atmosphere, and that in 50 years the whole world could be like that episode of Twilight Zone" with one of my favorite character actresses of all time, Lois Nettleton, where she plays one of the last people left on an Earth with constant, scorching sunlight and dwindling water supplies. It's probably not too hard for you to believe that I consider my entire life to be a "Twilight Zone" episode, but there you have it.

Anyhoo, I was relatively young the first time I saw that episode, but I remember being totally convinced that scenario could actually occur. And like so many Zone episodes, it scared the crap out of me to imagine the human race dying of thirst and heat stroke because we were too stupid to do something about it before it was too late.

It kind of reminds me of these lyrics from one of my favorite singers these days, the Nigerian artist Asa. Her song, "Fire on the Mountain," sums up my feelings about global warming, and about possibly living to see a dry, dusty peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro, perfectly.

"There is fire on the mountain,

And nobody seems to be on the run.

Oh there is fire on the mountain top,

And no one is'ah running."

We all need to just get a clue, before we're all starring in our own global Twilight Zone episode.