Climate Change – Page 7 – Susan Feathers

Wildlife Migrate North in Pacific

See this article from TerraDaily Express about the California Sea Lions migrating up the coast to colder waters in Oregon.

As a teenager I remember the population of sea lions on the wharf in San Francisco, that blanketed every flat surface. They provided a lot of entertainment for us visitors.

This article describes a whole population migration to caves off the coast of Oregon where colder waters support the food sources seals typically consume. Other migrations include shorebirds.

The article suggests that the El Nino in the Pacific waters, which was very strong this year (bringing unusually warm waters) may be the reason for this dramatic migration. Climate change, causing the warming of oceans, is most likely a boosting factor to the El Nino effects across the Pacific and the planet.

Florida Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coastline both benefit from the El Nino with wind shear patterns that kept hurricane activity to an all time low for the past season. Weather experts predict a stronger hurricane system next summer and fall but I wonder if ocean warming might institute a permanent El Nino effect???

The current winter season in the Midwest and Northeast also seems to be dramatic differences in our normal seasonal patterns. Again, we have to observe over time to know whether warming of oceans and melting of ice caps are responsible for these dramatic changes or these are the occasional flukes that happen from time to time with complex reasons we only decipher later (sun or celestial events.)

As NASA reports on climate change patterns, scientists are convinced that the planet surface is warming even with patterns of cooling and heating which they say are part of the longer term warming.

In Gujrat, India agronomists report mangoes ripening well before the normal seasonal pattern. These dramatic shifts in both plant and animal populations are heralds of large scale changes now affecting human life as well.

What is most dramatic to me is the near lack of news about climate change on our national media networks. Do we have our noses to the ground on health insurance when the greatest threat to our health is happening right in front of our faces?

Brilliant Solutions to Implacable Problems

Frances Moore Lappe’s new book, Liberation Ecology, identifies six dis-empowering ideas and re-frames them with insightful solutions. This book was recently published in a limited first edition with an invitation from the author to write her back with comments, edits, and additional ideas.

1. To save the planet, our economies have to stop growing.

2. We’ve hit the limits of a finite Earth.

3. We must overcome selfish human nature to save the planet.

4. To make progress, we have to override people’s innate resistance to the rules.

5. People are now so far removed from the natural world that they will never feel the connection to nature necesarry for an environmental turn-around.

6. Given the magnitude and scope of today’s problems, there’s no time for democracy.

Go to the website to read more and to take a short survey of your perceptions before reading the book and how Lappe addresses each of these ideas that are holding us back from a world in sync with nature and on a road to sustainability.

Chilling Predictions

New conversation develops on the Hill regarding climate change as a security threat.

Anthony C. Zinni, former head of the Central Command and retired Marine, made a chilling observation that we’ll either pay for reduction of green house gas emissions now or pay later with human lives in numerous conflicts induced by worldwide destablilization. His remarks were covered in a NY Times article reported by John M. Broder on a new conversation develping in Washington about climate change as a security threat. Mass migrations due to food shortages, conflicts over water and resources, and resentment toward the country that has put more carbon emissions in the atmosphere per capita than any other – U.S. – have long been sighted as potential impacts of a warming planet by the scientific community and governments (IPCC Reports). The Pentagon is taking climate change a lot more seriously and none too soon.

Wendell Berry Goes to Washington…again.

The Washington Post interviewed “three wise men” who presented their 50-yr plan for a new agriculture policy to Congress that ensures sustainable food systems in the U.S. At issue is their plan that spans fifty years, or ten farm bills. The Post’s Jane Black, asked these three experts whether our representatives can think that far ahead!

Good question.

Wendell Berry, a farmer and philosopher, whose writings illuminate the politics and ethics of modern agribusiness versus sustaining agriculture, told Janet Black he was not particularly hopeful (since the same issues he wrote about are the same issues he presented three decades later).

The long-term plan for a sustainable food system (conceived by Berry and geneticist Wes Jackson from the Land Institute, and sustainable-agriculture advocate Fred Kirschenmann with the Leopold Center) emphasizes perennials, not annuals. The reason has to do with cultivation of living communities in soil that foster resiliency to stress.

Drought and increasing temperatures, followed by flooding are some of the stress factors impinging on agricultural land. Industrial scale practices that ignore how soil communities sustain the productivity of land has been the U.S. approach to farming since the 1950s when fertilizers and pesticides ended widespread hunger in the U.S.

But the land is reaching exhaustion. With the new impacts of climate change, many experts fear a collapse of our once productive fields.

As a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, I read the discussions about “deniers” of climate change, even in the face of mounting evidence of its progress, and causal elements from humankind. As yet we don’t seem to know how to convince a large segment of our society which holds a view that climate change is a left-wing plot.

For any long-term change the public has to be able to think long-term. When our economy and political focus causes citizens to worry about basic needs (food, job and home) we put them at the base of Maslowe’s famous hierachy of needs. At the level of existence, people feel anxious.

Perhaps the long-term thinking that concerned leaders wish people to exercise is not possible under current political, social, and economic circumstances, or, even if people are willing to engage in long-term planning, misguided by leaders deny climate change as a threat.

Mrs. Obama established an organic garden at the White House and the the First Family dines on the garden’s sustainable produce. Will that sensibility spread beyond their table into national policy.

The jury is out. I would love to know what you think.