What are we willing to do to keep the worst from happening?

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Posted on July 15, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

This past week, there was an article (Study paints dire picture of warmer northeast) in the NY Times describing what is going to happen to the northeast as a result of global warming-induced climate change. It ain’t a pretty picture.

The Northeast can anticipate substantial — and often unwelcome or dangerous — changes during the rest of this century… The very character of the Northeast is at stake.

The quote is from the report of the Union of Concerned Scientists and you can read about it here.

Bye, bye, New York apples, Long Island lobster, and you’ll need a canoe to get to work in the Wall Street district.

This is by the end of the century, close to the life span of those being born today (it gets worse after that, of course).

Now, I want today to connect this to another story from this morning’s NY Times Week in Review section, which is about all those plastic bottles we keep buying to drink water, soda, ‘health’ drinks (whatever happened to a healthy diet and popping a vitamin pill?), and more.

Those bottles are one of the reasons why New York apples are going to disappear, and why Chicago will average 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 recently.

And folks, this is not about recycling them. We can’t keep up this particularly insane consumer habit and think that by putting them in a container curbside once a week that everything will come out okay. As this article points out, the carbon dioxide contribution to the atmosphere is made long before that. It’s in the oil that goes into the plastic and the shipping of this stuff all across the globe, and then the recycling, which uses lots of energy. And then most bottles are not recycled at all.

You can turn on your tap, use a good filter if you are concerned (I do), put the water in a reusable bottle, and take it with you. Or you can buy bottled water shipped from Iceland, for god’s sake!

We are so nuts, such victims of fads. How do we stop this to keep the row boats out of Manhattan streets, or the elderly from dying miserable deaths in the sweltering high rises of Chicago come 2080?

I keep asking myself what ‘conveniences’ — because much of what is creating our ecological emergencies are not needs, but rather conveniencies that we think are now necessities — what conveniences are we willing to give up for the sake of the planet?

Good God, it is getting late to stave off a real disaster.


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