Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

In light of yesterday’s post, thought I would send this article from Reuters, about how climate change is threatening California’s water supply. Drastic loss of snow pack due to global warming and greenhouse gas emissions appears to be the principal culprit.

This is pretty stunning stuff. This is lots of millions of people along with a significant chunk of US agricutural production that is under threat.

But one can only wonder, still, at the amazing incapacity of this society to get information like this and then respond with the urgency it deserves. One can only wonder that we go on about our business as if this kind of thing could not possibly be true. We seem frozen, paralyzed, unable to make the conceptual leap to realizing the dire nature of our ecological crisis.

Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics, says in this article:

If I were emperor of the world, I would put the pedal to the floor on energy efficiency and conservation for the next decade.

Alas, he is not emperor, not even president. We are like the deer staring frozen at the headlights barreling down on it, unable to get those legs to move, to take action, to get out of the way.

And so I fear the crash will come.

Or we can stop waiting for an emperor or a president, and get busy changing how we live.

[To see how climate change will impact California, click on this page from the Union of Concerned Scientists. The page includes a graph that shows what will happen to the snow pack under the three scenarios laid out by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Should be must reading for a Californian!]

[tags] California drought, California water supply, dinimishing snow pack, water scarcity, Steven Chu, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory[/tags]

Graph credit: Found in the Contra Costa Times, May 2