The heating of New England

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Posted on October 6, 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:

Farewell to New England as we knew it.  We have already set in motion climate change that will alter its weather in drastic ways, and therefore its geography.  Good bye to the beautiful sugar maples and their glorious autumn red — they will be migrating north, if they survive.  Vermont maple syrup — may soon become a dying industry.

This is what yet another study is announcing to us.  Read it and weep, if you love New England — and I do so much.  I am not alone in noticing that the colors of Vermont’s autumn are not as vibrant as they used to be.

The choice is this, says the linked article — a low emission future or a high emission future — drastic change or really terrible drastic change.

But the choice is a real one.  We may no longer be able to salvage the stable climate we have known for centuries, and we may not be able to keep the natural world around us (of which we are a part, remember) from being altered in ways that will surely cause us grief, real grief.  But how bad do we want things to get, and do we want the altered reality to be habitable, tolerable, and to contain the hope of a future for our children’s children?

I know that lately it seems all many of us are doing is sounding desperate alarms.  But that is exactly what we are doing — and like the ones that keep ringing louder and louder in the morning as we try to ignore them, we are trying to scream louder and louder into the ears of this society to shake us from our paralysis.

Let’s see if we can turn down the temperature at which New England and the rest of our world will cook.  Let’s see if we can change in time to salvage — with love and reverence — a habitable Earth.

For more on how global warming might affect you, go here.  Yes, grief will be appropriate.

Comments

2 Responses to “The heating of New England”

  1. The Passion of the Earth — a reflection for Holy Week : Spirituality and Ecological Hope on April 1st, 2007 2:22 pm

    […] as we have written previously at this site, by the end of the century, the sugar maples will be gone from New England, if current warming […]

  2. The dulling of autumn : Spirituality and Ecological Hope on October 22nd, 2007 10:20 am

    […] We have posted about this before, and you can review the information here. […]

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