TRUMP WAVE endangers our Coastlines : Our Lives, Our Livelihoods

I am typing this post at 5 AM  just a few linear feet from the Atlantic Ocean at  the outside edge of the former Coast Guard base in Dartmouth Nova Scotia, a few days after Donald Trump unexpectedly won the US presidency and vowed to immediately gut all of Obama's climate-saving measures.

I am just a few linear feet from the ocean's wrath but because I am on a steep hill feel my life is secure from even the worst of wind and tide storm surge damage sure to fall on my province's vulnerable coastline in my own lifetime as a result of Trump's decision to deny the threat of global climate disaster.

But in my granddaughter Sam's lifetime ?

I am suddenly no longer so sanguine.

And in my own lifetime and in the lifetime of my fellow baby boomers (the people who make up the majority of the relatively few Nova Scotians who currently bother to vote), I now expect this new Trump Wave will greatly threaten our livelihoods, if not our personal safety.

No part of narrow little Nova Scotia is more than 35 miles from the sea and it is almost uniquely highly dependent for its economic survival upon the renewable biological wealth generated at its coastline.

As a result most of our population, homes, public infrastructure and businesses  is found along our coastline and much of that physical infrastructure will be damaged or destroyed by the increased height of water and increased force of winds and waves, created by ever rising global temperatures.

If our Nova Scotian coastline is wrecked, the economy of the rest of Nova Scotia, the livelihoods of those of us living beyond the direct sight of water, will be just as destroyed.

In this schoolyard fight between big Trump and small Nova Scotia, there can be no bystanders : you are either a conservative sycophant cheerleading for Trump or part of the rest of the political community lined up against him.

Once again, as I have all through my entire life, I find my conscience torn between doing on what I personally want to do and doing what I feel the greater community calls me to do.

I am a bookworm and an introvert  (believe it or not !) : preferring to be quietly working on a long term goal in the artistic and intellectual sphere.

But repeatedly I find myself pushed (only by myself I admit) to intervene loudly and publicly on behalf of some cause in trouble.

The moment I feel that cause is on a more secure footing, I quickly find an excuse to cut and run back to my quiet life of books, reading and writing.

So it was with the NDP and the environment, transit, women's rights in the distant past and the environment and my local Green Party efforts more recently.

So lately I have been doing my bit to save the provincial party from extinction and to promote proportional representation voting, but basically nothing immediate and concrete to protect the global environment.

That, I claimed, was in good hands and besides my upcoming book was, indirectly, 'all about the environment'.

But now - post Trump's win - I find myself once again greatly torn between again delaying my book by throwing myself into politics or deciding to stick with it through to its publication as my best possible contribution to the fight for the environment, here in NS and throughout the world...