Heard about the Canadian ice shelf?
Share your Thoughts
Posted on December 30, 2006
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
I imagine most of you have heard by now about the massive chunk of ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic that broke off and floated out to sea. It happened in 2005 but was just recently documented by satellite photos. Family members first emailed the story to me, and now I have seen it in many places. Despite the media exposure, I suppose the story is being buried today behind the obscene narrative being played out in Iraq, but I have to insist that it is a much bigger story in the scheme of things.
The part that keeps me bleak these days is not that these events weren’t ancticipated with the rise in the Earth’s temperature, but that it is happening much sooner than anyone expected. It just makes me wonder how bad things are going to get before we wake up and make the necessary drastic changes.
The NY Times had a small story about it on the bottom half of page 9 today. The journalist who writes these stories for the times, Andrew C. Revkin, certainly tries, writes many fine articles; but they are usually buried somewhere deep inside. And when one of his stories is as short as this one, one has to wonder how much it was cut by editors. You might want to write to the Times and challenge them about this.
I mention the Times in particular today because they had another story — a more hopeful story in the sense that it provides action suggestions, things we all can do, to reduce our carbon emissions – but this one was really buried — on page 5 of the Saturday Business Section, and a holiday weekend at that. How many folks do you think will read today’s Business section?
Anyway, here it is. It focuses on how we must change our travel habits, as in how we move about to work and play, what form of transportation we use and how much we could save in carbon emissions if we were willing to turn in our SUVs for gas efficient cars. The savings are far, far greater than changing our incandescent light bulbs to compact florescent bulbs, which, of course, is still very important.
Among the many positive things in this article is the emphasis on efficiency and conservation — cutting back our consumption of fossil fuels. The feds and most corporations want us to believe that the real fix is in new technologies that will eventually magically replace what heats our homes and fills our gas tanks now and we can go on in happy bliss. The reality is that cutting consumption, efficiency and conservation are the absolutely vital, necessary, irreplaceable immediate first steps if we are to keep the worst from happening.
The worst? An uninhabitable planet.
This article may still not go far enough, but it does give us the statistics that make that point. US carbon emissions amount to an average of 44,000 pounds per person per year, says the article, and we must reduce that by 26,000-35,000 pounds in order to stabilize ‘atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.’
And we must do that quickly. The leadership we need right now at all levels of the society is the kind that comes up with a plan for how to do that, sharing the burdens and responsibilities, and doing it equitably so that the poorest and the financially stressed are not expected to bear the brunt of the sacrifice.
In the end, what seems like a sacrifice can become one of the most important projects human beings have ever taken on — the healing of the planet we have so sorely abused and wounded over the past two centuries of industrial expansion.
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