Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

The Bush administration has been ridiculed for so long for challenging the science behind climate change, and then for its efforts to undermine international efforts to reduce the offending carbon dioxide emissions, that the very fact that our government would issue a stark, scary report on the impacts of global warming is a bit disorienting, no?

Anyway, that happened yesterday. The report is entitled, The effects of climate change on agriculture, land resources, water resources, and biodiversity in the United States, a peer-reviewed study released by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research.

From their press release:

The report finds that climate change is already affecting U.S. water resources, agriculture, land resources, and biodiversity, and will continue to do so.

The study shows that there will be major disruptions in agriculture, forests, water supplies, and the functioning of ecosystems across the country, with especially serious consequences for the western states. Agriculture will be challenged by changing weather patterns and the increase of pests old and new, along with invasive species that will threaten native crops.

From environmental journalist Andrew Revkin in today’s NY Times:

According to the report, Western states will face substantial challenges because of growing demand for water and big projected drops in supplies…

Farmers, foresters and ranchers nationwide will face a complicated blend of changes, driven not only by shifting weather patterns but also by the simultaneous spread of nonnative plant and insect pests…

The West will not only face a dearth of water, but also large shifts in when it is available. Water supplies there will be transformed by midcentury, with mountain snows that provided a steady flow of runoff for irrigation and reservoirs dwindling. That flow will be replaced by rainfall that comes at times and in amounts that make it hard to manage, the report and authors said.

The report also emphasized that the country’s capacity to detect climate shifts and related effects was eroding, as budgets and plans for long-term monitoring of air, water and land changes — both on the ground and from satellites — shrank.

From Juliet Elperin at the Washington Post:

Global warming is already affecting the nation’s forests, water resources, farmland and wildlife, and will have serious negative consequences over the next 25 to 50 years, according to a report issued yesterday by the federal government…

Anthony C. Janetos, director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute of the University of Maryland and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said the document aims to inform federal resource managers and dispel the public’s perception that global warming will not be felt until years from now.

“They imagine all these ecological impacts are in some distant future,” said Janetos, one of the lead authors, who noted that many animals and plants have shifted their migratory and blooming patterns to reflect recent changes in temperature. “They’re not in some distant future. We’re experiencing them now.”

The WP did a much better job of covering this incredibly important story, putting this very good article on Page A2. The NY Times, as is its practice, kind of buried it on the bottom half of page A14.

This matters, folks. This matters a lot. You might want to contact the editorial boards of your local newspapers and demand that this issue receive the coverage it deserves, at least as much space as war and political campaigns given the impact that climate change will have, is having, on all of our lives, given the threats to the future of our children and their children’s children.

I will write more about this later in the week, especially the moral implications and the need to dig down deep for the spiritual resources we will need to make the required changes. This is, literally, about how to save life as we know it on the planet, the conditions of life that made our species possible.

Live differently. Make saving the ecosystems in which you live a central project of your lives. This is one of the most important causes of our generation.

[tags] U.S. Climate Change Science Program, Joint Global Change Research Institute, impacts of climate change on U.S., Bush climate change denial[/tags]

Photo credits:

Air pollution off eastern coast U.S., Visible Earth, NASA
Smog over Beijing, China, Visible Earth, NASA