Ecological hope is about a whole lot more than climate change
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Posted on July 10, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
We try to emphasize this whenever we can: our ecological crises is about a whole lot more than global climate change. That is but one in a long list of concerns under a larger heading — ecological overshoot, living beyond the means of the planet to sustain the human species with the combination of our consumption and our waste product (an overabundance of carbon dioxide being one of them).
It is about how we live, a whole way of life that has used up the gifts of the Earth as if there were no tomorrow. Yesterday on PBS’s ‘The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,’ someone finally spoke to this on national TV — that what is going on out West over the past decade or more — the drought that has settled in for the long haul — is a sign not just of a passing event, but of climate change.
Jeffrey Brown interviewed Lisa Graumlich, director of the School of Natural Resources at the University of Arizona, and it was sobering. I recommend reading or listening. Here are a few snippets:
…this is actually starting to become a bit of a norm. The drought that we’re currently in actually started in 1999 and has persisted. And it’s been a drought that’s not only been severe, but it’s been very pervasive.
…what we’re seeing here and for the last several years is this west-wide pattern of drought.
…what we’re seeing is a reduced snow pack related to no rains coming, but also anywhere from a week to almost four weeks earlier melting off of that snow. So what happens then is that these forested lands start to dry out earlier in the spring.
…what we might be seeing here in the Southwest and in the West in general is an expansion of what we call the Hadley Cell circulation.
…So as the entire climate system warms, the movement of the jet stream that brings, you know, moisture to us here in the West from the Pacific Ocean has started to migrate north. And arguably it’s sort of going to sort of continue to move north and create a permanent dust bowl-type situation here in the Southwest.
Those are sobering thoughts.
Sobering thoughts indeed. We have noted in the past that the population growth out west is unsustainable and leading to a crisis in the not-too-distant future — you know, like running out of water, like increasingly unsustainable energy demands due to increasingly intolerable heat — little things like that.
If you read the link, note that she is not saying that they know for certain that this situation is caused by global warming. It may be. But whether or not that is the cause, it seems the climate is changing — not the weather, the climate. Climate has changed in the past without the dramatic CO2 build-up of the industrial age.
So this is what I mean — our ecological crisis is not just about global warming, it is mostly about living wrongly on the planet, and nowhere are we living as ‘wrongly’ as we are out west.
Now, about those increasing energy demands, for example, for air conditioning in the super-heat that is consuming vast swaths of the US this summer. Let’s sober up a bit more with a couple of articles in the Business section of today’s NY Times.
Costs surge for building power plants and Rise in world oil use and a possible shortage of supplies are seen in the next five years.
Now, let’s put this whole picture of climate change, unsustainable development, rapidly escalating costs of providing energy, oil shortages over the next few years, with this little tidbit:
In May, consumer credit took a surprisingly sharp rise (an annual rate of 6.4%) and we became more indebted than ever. Then think about the record foreclosures as more people find that their mortgages have become unaffordable.
How does this picture look to you?
Once again — our ecological crises (plural, because they are multiple) are not just a global warming problem. They are a problem of how human beings live on the planet.
Hope rests rather urgently on us ‘getting’ this. A few tweaks in gas mileage will not get us out of this one. Putting a halt to inappropriate development will get us a lot closer. And putting an end to the unsustainable American Dream of ever-increasing riches and higher standards of living — that one needs to be buried once and for all.
Unless we don’t care what kind of world our kids are going to live in.
Technorati Tags: heat waves, wildfires, NewsHour with Jin Lehrer, Lisa Graumlich, energy costs, oil shortages, consumer debt
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[…] 100-110-degree temps in the summer by 2080, and one factor in why the southwest is turning into a ‘permanent dust bowl-type situation,’ as one scientist said […]