What a melting glacier means to one Swiss village
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Posted on October 25, 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:
With all the bad news about global warming and climate change, we can get dizzy with the large scale of the changes. The Arctic Ocean is melting, the Greenland ice sheet is melting, all the glaciers of the world are melting, ocean levels are rising threatening to flood coastal cities, the ocean conveyor belt is slowing down, etc., etc.
But then there is the impact of these large phenomena in one small space, one community. These impacts are being felt all over the world. Here is one example, this poignant story in yesterday’s NY Times – the disappearing glacier in Gletsch, Swizerland, and what this means for the people there. The photograph is very dramatic and puts the lie to all those who say that global warming is some leftwing foolishness.
I think these ’small’ stories are needed in order to ‘get’ what climate change means for us. Things are really changing in Europe, more record heat this year, more wild and enormous wildfires, more areas threatened with desertification — and many climatologists saying this could be related to the slowing of the conveyor belt that has kept the climate in that part of the continent moderate for millenia.
One of the books I recommend on this blog is High Tide: the Truth About Our Climate Crisis, by Mark Lynas, kind of a climate change travelogue. He has many stories like these, some scarier because we are talking about the threat to the lives of millions of people. In one of his chapters, ‘Peru’s Melting Point,’ he describes what melting glaciers mean to those who live in the tropical mountains of South America, where glacier and snowpack melt is their singular supply of water. Click on the book title in the ‘Related Information” sidebar for more info on the book (and if you click on his name above, it will take you to his fine blog).
In the chapter that follows, Lynas writes:
The atmosphere we breathe today is chemically different from that breathed by our ancestors throughout the entire evolutionary history of the human race.
This is true. This is what the scientists were saying at the Gaia Theory conference that I posted about last week (see posts from Oct. 16 & 17).
…as a result the Earth’s climate has begun to tilt out of balance.
All these drastic signs of what is happening — and, still, action, lifestyle changes, value changes, are not nearly up to the urgency of the situation.
Once again, the question behind my project, Spirituality and Ecological Hope, is this — what kind of human beings will we be as we go through the crisis? and will we change in time? We cannot go on altering the chemical make-up of the Earth’s atmosphere and think that somehow things will turn out okay. We cannot keep doing this and think that humans will somehow just adapt and survive.
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