Dear Flat Earther
We just received this SOS from one of our online merchants where the ReSpek Nature popup features. In an email to the merchant from a customer: "Why are you supporting Climate Change bullsh*t with your carbon footprint cr*p? Unless I get a decent answer as to why your company is supporting woke bullsh*t, I will recommend that my followers also boycott your company." How do you respond to angry climate change skeptics?
Dear Concerned Consumer
Despite the skepticism, the science is pretty convincing about the shifts and changes to the climate over the past two centuries which seems to correlate pretty well with the dawn of the industrial revolution and the start in earnest of burning fossil fuels to generate electricity and move stuff around. Which also correlates to atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases.
However you spin it, if we can find a way to maintain a comfortable lifestyle that does not negatively affect any aspect of our environment, then let’s do it. In fact, we have dozens of merchants and thousands of consumers who are participating in the ReSpek Nature program.
These are individuals and organisations that love what we are doing, and are willing to put their hands in their pockets to support our project and want to make a difference, and do.
Our supporters are not only contributing towards reducing CO2 in the atmosphere, but their contributions have a far greater and immediate impact, here’s some of the back story to ReSpek Nature and spekboom:
Over decades and decades, farmers in the Karoo have been exploiting the succulent vegetation that has resulted in irreversible damage to the thicket biome (the natural habitat of spekboom). The loss of vegetation causes runoff and erosion, groundwater reserves are not able to be replenished. Weather patterns have changed, rain that normally fell in the spring and summer now comes in winter, if at all, resulting in a landscape that is desolate and barren that cannot support livestock, but can also no longer support the rural communities that live there. The only intervention to restore and reinvigorate the land is a manual process of planting spekboom.
Why spekboom? Besides its incredible capacity to suck up carbon, it retains water and returns nutrients back into the soil which helps to attract other plant species. Ultimately restoring the land to a point where it will in fact be able to support livestock once more in a managed capacity!
No matter how skeptical you may be about anthropogenic climate change, giving someone dignified work that allows them to be able to support themselves and their families is invaluable, and we get to have a restored environment that can be enjoyed by all on this tiny blue marble in this immense universe.
Sincerely
The ReSpek Nature Team