Arctic ponds drying up, permafrost is draining, habitats are being destroyed all over the Earth
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Posted on July 9, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Yesterday we focused on suburban and exurban sprawl, today’s fundamental conflict between developers and those who cherish the Earth. Besides everything else wrong with sprawl, it is habitat-destroying. And humans are doing so much of that around the world that ecosystems are breaking down. Already we see the beginning of the local breakdowns that will lead to the really big ones not too long from now.
One of the things that always impresses me is when scientists are impressed — by how rapidly and dramatically the changes are taking place.
So a new Canadian study shows the continuing rapid decline and disappearance of Arctic lakes and pond – a truly serious indicator of how fast we are warming. 
Climate change in the Arctic is most dramatic, our canary in the mine trying to tell us something we don’t want to get.
Lakes in Siberia are draining, too, as permafrost melts and so does the water beneath it — “draining the water like pulling the plug on a bathtub.”
What is so sad in all this is how the warming and resulting climate change is accelerating the ’sixth great extinction,’ already underway across the globe. We are losing the rich biodiverse fabric of life that has been the hallmark of this remarkable age in evolutionary history.
You see, when an ecosystem is destroyed, when the life there dies, it is destroyed. It’s not as if we can stop doing what we’re doing and all is well. Earth can ‘restore’ systems that are damaged but not destroyed, if we stop doing the damage. Earth can ‘regenerate’ after the destruction, but it will be something different, something new, and the way we are going, the human species may not be part of the regeneration.
Said one of the scientists in the Canadian study about the arctic ponds:
…they won’t be the same again… since many of the organisms that once lived in the ponds have probably died.
So what is happening is not just that some ponds are drying up, evaporating away in the warming temperatures, it is that an entire habitat is dying.
The same is true in Bucks County PA, part of yesterday’s focus. Global warming is destroying habitats for life all over the Arctic. Developers are doing it all over the United States. And when we let them do it, when they are given permission by local authorities and politicians, or the ‘market,’ god help us, when we buy houses in their developments, we are collaborating in that destruction, that death.
Ths is not just suffering for ‘other’ creatures with whom we share this planet, but for this egomaniacal species called homo sapiens that simply does not know how to control itself and remain in the balance of life. How could consciousness lead us to a place where one species believes it moral to kill the habitats and ecosystems of our planet so that they can have a nice house in the country with a view?
Are we really that small?
Well, no, many, many are not. And we have to rise to this occasion because the stakes get higher with every passing day.
Watch the news today and view the fires all across the West. See our future.
It is time to stop ‘development’ in all these vulnerable places that cannot withstand the assault of our way of life upon them. And it is time to stop the consumption and waste patterns that are destroying ecosystems from the Arctic to Bucks County PA to the Amazon rainforest to Sub-Saharan Africa and on and on and on…
Technorati Tags: arctic ponds, permafrost melting, suburban sprawl, habitat destruction, ecosystem destruction, sixth great extinction, developers, Bucks County PA
Photo credit: Global Warming Drying Up Ancient Arctic Ponds, National Geographic News, July 2, 2007; photo by MSV Douglas
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