Cashmere, China and damaged lungs in California; Brazil gets real about global warming; and then the matter of a little heat, a bit of rain
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Posted on July 31, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Greenhouse gas emissions, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Have been out of communication for a bit and the post title suggests I’ve been doing some catching up. There are a few issues I wanted to bring up today, just to give us the bigger picture again of our ecological predicament.
Before that, want to mention that I was in Oakland for several days for the summer institute of the Sophia Center in Culture and Spirituality, located on the campus of Holy Names University. I will give you the link and heartily recommend a visit to their site. The program was terrific, as was the subsequent 2-day retreat. More on this another time.
Did you watch The Colbert Report last night? Our intrepid ‘newscaster’ interviewed Evan Osnos, journalist for the Chicago Tribune, who has been writing about the connection between our cashmere sweaters, the creation of moonscapes and dust storms in China, and the pollution folks breathe in Los Angeles and Seattle. I looked up the original article, and you can read it here.
This is a fine example of the links between our consumption and ecological destruction. It is why so many of us working on these issues keep coming back to the consumerism of the affluent as key to our crisis. If this doesn’t change, if we don’t stop consuming like this, the chances of saving our planet for life as we know it is nil.
Meanwhile, the NY Times had an article this morning about climate change and Brazil and how the government there is beginning to figure out that this is not just a vast conspiracy of the rich northern countries to take control of the Amazon rainforest. The forest is in big trouble because of the combined devastation of deforestation and climate change, and one question is whether or not the region is approaching a ‘tipping point’ very soon, past which the forest ecosystem will collapse.
Cutting down rainforests (any forests, actually) releases enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere very rapidly, while also destroying the Earth’s biggest carbon sequester system. Deforestation is one of the greatest dangers to our survivability on this planet and unless we get this under control, we are in big trouble.
What drives this destruction? Oh, things like our demand for wood which feeds greedy timber industries around the world, things like our new demand for biodiesel which has put huge swaths of rainforest in places like Indonesia under the bulldozer for palm oil — once again, our consumption.
It is also driven by poor countries development needs, and so unless we start rethinking development and the energy that fuels it, the destruction will continue.
Meanwhile, it got a bit warm this summer all across the country — the parched west in flames, parts of Texas under water from deluge after deluge. In southern Europe, hundreds of people have died in sweltering heat waves, while Britain has been under water from storms the likes of which have not been seen in several decades. Again, no one can say, “these floods are caused by global warming,” only that computer models project such things. But as this article from Live Science points out, besides the climate change factor is, once again, development. Contributing to floods are all that pavement, all that development that has disrupted natural water flows, rivers damned and dredged, wetlands destroyed. Climate change combined with maldevelopment and consumption — they are adding up to vast ecosystem destruction
It’s us. We are the problem. How we live on the Earth is the problem.
Climate change and totally misplaced and inapproriate development has created a world of trouble, hasn’t it?
No matter how one approaches is, without changes in how we live, without changes in our consumer lifestyles, without our willingness to move quickly to simplicity and away from economic growth as a model for human life, we are in very, very big trouble.
Technorati Tags: evan osnos, cashmere and climate change, Amazon rainforest, deforestation, development models, consumerism, Britain floods, heat waves, air pollution, the colbert report
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