Island nation vanishes
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Posted on December 28, 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:
As we come to the end of 2006, we pass a milestone — the first island nation has disappeared under the rising seas. This has been a major concern of climate scientists who have been trying to warn us about how global warming is causing the seas to rise, threatening island nations and low-lying areas (like Florida, lower Manhattan, and the Gulf Coast) with inundation.
The swelling of the oceans is caused by multiple factors, among them, warming waters and then the melting of polar ice sheets, ice caps, and glaciers around the globe.
Some island populations have been trying to raise the alarm for years now, among them the island nation of Tuvalu, whose people have been watching the ocean come steadily closer to their homes, eroding the shoreline. If the warming trend continues apace, the island will disappear very soon. But there is also a crisis unfolding in places like Alaska as well, where the permafrost is melting and as the sea level rises, ocean waves are tearing away huge pieces of the shore.
What was once billed as a future crisis is already upon us.
AP reported yesterday that erosion and flooding is already impacting 184 of 213 Native Alaskan villages. We have drawn attention before to the crisis that has befallen the Alaskan village of Shishmaref. Its people were dubbed “the first refugees of global warming” a couple of years ago.
The cost of relocating these communities is already estimated in the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, and keep in mind that we are only getting started.
The other cost, of course, the incalculable one, is to the community life and cultures of these populations — here long before we Europeans ever showed up.
I have raised this point before, but it seems we must insist on it. These first populations impacted by global warming are also among those least responsible for the carbon emissions and other industrial pollutants that are warming and altering the Earth’s atmosphere. We are simply going to have to own up to our ethical responsibility for this — especially as we get in our car each day to go to work, drive the kids to school, or to go shopping, while taking a plane to a winter vacation spot, or cutting down more trees and destroying more wetlands for home and business developments.
I believe that ecological hope, our future as a species, depends upon us being able to restore our ability to experience, to feel, to know in every cell of our being and in our spirits, our profound connections to other humans, to other species, and to relearn in that experience how much we are a part of this one Nature that is the living system of our planet. And then, as in any significant relationship, we must learn once again how to take care of it, to be responsible for it, to do our part in the work to restore it, heal it, make it whole.
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