The greening of Thomas Friedman
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Posted on June 24, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
What’s gotten into that great champion of capitalism and the global corporate culture, Thomas Friedman? He’s all over the place these days talking doom and gloom about global warming and climate change, along with the looming crisis around peak oil and our dependency on fossil fuels. The guy is getting all green on us.
Tonight on the Discovery Channel, he brings a report called “Addicted to Oil.” It’s on at 10 EDT. Since we haven’t seen it, we can’t vouch for it, but if we all watch it, maybe we can share some commentary on this blog.
Lately Friedman has been writing about global warming and the oil crisis as well in his columns for the NY Times. Yesterday’s Op-Ed, The World is Hot, rang the alarm bell. He focuses on the glaciers in Peru that are quickly disappearing, and with that the fresh water source for millions of Peruvians.
Locals have noticed the climate change – “The water level is going down, and the temperature is going up,” according to one corn farmer – and are very aware that when the glaciers are gone, they will have to leave the mountain valleys where they have lived for generations. Gone, too, will be the ecotourism dollars that the glaciers attracted.
Friedman writes: “For many Americans, combating climate change is at best a cause for green do-gooders and at worse something to be debated. But in a developing country like Peru, where many people live on the land and close to the edge, climate change is neither a hobby nor a question for debate.”
Well, Mr. Friedman, I agree with your second point, but I would like to rebut your insult to the many Americans who are long past do-gooder concern about global warming (including yours truly). Extraordinary efforts are being made to alter lives drastically, to educate and organize, and even at the state level, some governments are beginning to take important steps, as in California and the northeast – efforts the Bush administration is trying to undermine.
But I sure do appreciate your getting religion on this, if a bit late. You might try holding up some of the exceptional work of groups and individuals whose passion about this predates yours.
“We need a different lifestyle model,” he writes – and we could not agree more.
I believe non-subscribers have to pay for this column, so with all due respect to the Times, who should be making these op-eds free to the world, I have copied the Friedman column below.
And if you want to read a poignant and passionate account of what is happening in Peru, I highly recommend Mark Lynas's book listed in the 'Books/publications of note' sidebar. Better yet, here's the direct link.
Ecological Hope is a project of the Center for New Creation. Donations are tax deductible and will be used to generate materials for workshops and retreats and a new interactive web site to be launched in the fall. Checks or money orders can be made out to the Center for New Creation, earmarked EcoHope, and sent to the address in the contact box on this blog.
June 23, 2006Op-Ed Columnist
The World is Hot
Machu Picchu, Peru
For Peru, global warming is not just "an inconvenient truth."
It's a daily reality, particularly for the residents in the spectacular Urubamba River Valley, the birthplace of Incan civilization. Watching the sun rise from atop the Incan ruins at Machu Picchu, you can look around 360 degrees and see Andean mountains everywhere. The highest of them were always described in the guidebooks as "snow capped." Today, they're more "snow frosted."
They still have snow, but there is a lot of rock now showing through on many of them. If these trends continue, in a few years they'll just be described as "steely gray." The great Andean glaciers are melting, receding at about 100 meters a decade.
"When I first started trekking to the Andes mountains 30 years ago, many climbing expeditions would reach the top by climbing straight across the glaciers," said my traveling companion, Alfredo Ferreyros, the father of Peru's ecotourism industry, now head of Peruvian operations of Conservation International. "Now, expeditions have to negotiate crevasses and increased risk of avalanche, because of the instability of the snow pack. That's because of changes in temperature and fluctuations in precipitation."
Nearby, in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, Jose Ignacio Lambarri, who owns a 60-acre farm, is also feeling the heat. He grows giant white corn, with kernels that used to be as big as a quarter. This corn, which is exported to Spain and Japan, grows in this valley because of a unique combination of water, temperature, soil and sun. But four years ago, Mr. Lambarri told me, he started to notice something: "The water level is going down, and the temperature is going up."
As a result, the giant corn kernels are not growing quite as large as they used to, new pests have started appearing, and there is no longer enough water to plant the terraces in the valley that date from Incan times.
He also noticed that the snow line he had grown up looking at for 44 years was starting to recede, which was making relations with his fellow farmers more difficult. Every year they decide by committee how to divide up the water. Now, "every year the meetings get more heated, because there is less water to distribute and the same amount of land that needs it," he said. "I tell my wife the day that mountain loses its snow, we will have to move out of the valley."
For many Americans, combating climate change is at best a cause for green do-gooders and at worse something to be debated. But in a developing country like Peru, where many people live on the land and close to the edge, climate change is neither a hobby nor a question for debate.
Peru's water reserves are the glaciers and snowpacked areas of the
Andes. Since they have started to shrink, without replenishment, "we don't know what the future holds — whether we're talking about the water we need for agriculture or for drinking or for our hydropower," Mr. Ferreyros said.
Peru's plant and animal species are also being affected. The Andes region is one of the world's most mega-diverse hot spots, home to unique plant and animal species. Its rain forests, mountains and varied terrain create microclimates that provide habitats for endemic species, which have evolved in isolation from one another. As climate change shifts the boundaries between these zones, species found nowhere else in the world are threatened and disappearing.
"Within the U.S. we worry about the impact of climate change when we suffer from coastal storms like Katrina. But we have the resources to adapt," said Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president at Conservation International. Countries like Peru not only feel the effects of climate change more, because they have many more people living precariously off the land, he added, "but they also don't have the national resources to adapt."
Worse, to take advantage of high energy prices, Peru is allowing more oil and gas exploration. In other words, lacking a diverse range of products to export, Peru has to feed the very global oil addiction that is coming back to haunt it in the form of climate change.
Sitting here, you can see the whole global vicious cycle we are in and have to break. To combat climate change, we need to break our addiction to consuming oil, while developing countries need to break their addiction to selling it. We need a different lifestyle model, and they need a different development model. Unless we work on both, the "snow-capped
Andes" will exist more in history books than in guidebooks.
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