Susan Feathers

Ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010 (high confidence). It is virtually certain that the upper ocean (0−700 m) warmed from 1971 to 2010 (see Figure SPM.3), and it likely warmed between the 1870s and 1971. {3.2, Box 3.1}. Read the pdf of the policy makers summary:

WGIAR5-SPM_Approved27Sep2013

The David Suzuki Foundation published a new blog post this month addressing the anticipated release of the IPCC report (released September 26.)  It is an interesting review of the major newspapers and publications that published denier articles as well as a version of the IPCC report by a climate change denier group. There are links to articles and the alternative report.

**The IPCC report outlines the transfer of heat from the atmosphere to the ocean surface. The Ocean Conservancy is tracing another phenomenon: acidification of the ocean at the interface with the atmosphere where increased carbon dioxide reacts with water and becomes a weak acid. Over time and with increasing concentration of CO2 in the air, acidification is increasing and wreaking havoc in the Pacific Ocean.

 The New York Times Article on Release of the 5th IPCC Report.

Guernica: With theses new risks and forms of engagement, how would you describe this time in history?

Terry Tempest Williams: I think we will look back at this time in history as a time of great transition. I think about a particular bridge in the Penobscot area of Maine. When we would drive from Bucksport to Belfast, we had to cross this bridge. For years, we would cross this rickety, rusted green bridge, and every time we crossed it, we would hold our breath and think, “I hope we make it across.” You’d see these large cables that were holding the bridge up, splitting, sagging, and the car would start rocking. And then, whew! Thank god, you’d be on the other side. We’d all sigh with relief.

And then, some time down the line, we noticed a new bridge was being built. We were still driving on the old bridge, but I was mindful each time we crossed the old bridge, of the beauty and the design, and at times, the precariousness of this new bridge that was under construction. I kept thinking, “I hope we make it to the new bridge before the old bridge falls down.” And then, one miraculous day, the new bridge was built and we were driving across it. The old bridge was no longer in use.

I feel like that’s where we are now. I feel like we are building this new bridge. I hope we can finish it in time. There are these two parallel realities that we’re facing: the old consciousness and the new consciousness. What will bring us together? Disasters? Economic crisis? Our awareness?

Read the whole interview with Terry Tempest Williams at Guernica Magazine:  Ground Truthing, interview by Devon Fredericksen (August 1, 2013)

Naked, muscles rippling, sweat shining, he heaves the flaming spear into the black of night igniting life on some fortuitous star.

We have been told that a meteor carrying life molecules may have seeded life on this blue planet eons ago. Think of it. God, the Johnny Appleseed of the galaxies, casting life particles upon the Heavens…

The Earth a woman, womb lay in waiting, enveloping to nourish the first forms of life. The whole pageant of living plants and animals, microscopic to elephantine, began that day when a meteor streaked into the fair winds and plummeted to earth. How I would have loved to be there, to watch the fiery descent and crash!

One time I wrote about the place I lived – Tucson, Arizona -the Place of Black Stones, tracing its geologic and natural history to the present day saguaro forests. Here it is below. I challenge readers to try a similar exploration,  learn how your homeland came to be what it is. I guarantee it will change the way you relate to the landscape because in the long-view, we are just a flash in the pan, a part of the enormity. It’s humbling and for some reason I found it comforting.

From Paean to the Earth (Williams, 2008, Four Feathers Press)

Changeling

Playing off Ken Burn’s title for his award-winning film about the National Parks (America’s Best Idea), I look at fracking as its polar opposite. The fact that it is in our repertoire of extraction technologies at all is another indication that we are still willing to let expedient methodologies lure us from harder decisions that truly turn us toward the cleanest forms of oil extraction.

Hydraulic fracking threatens watersheds and releases carbon monoxide gas (three times more heat-trapping than CO2). Below is a report from Cornell University demonstrating the increased threats to global ecosystems from fracking as compared to mining coal.

Howarth-EtAl-2011

We let this business opportunity drive another stampede to economic development and individual profit. Its true that new jobs at drill sites pay well. Desperate Americans and their families follow the gravy train to pull themselves out of poverty. They are not to blame.Shame on us that we provide opportunities that imperil workers, their families, and communities from the worst impacts of a highly polluting form of extraction. The National Academies Press just released a report on the health impacts of fracking on workers. Once again the technologies are in front of safety for workers; after they begin showing signs of health problems, then we begin to investigate.

Yes, going to natural gas as we make our way to alternative fuels that are not harmful to the environment is a strategy we have to use. But HOW we get there and HOW SOON we get there are once again subverted to benefit oil companies at the expense of everyone on the planet.

Human beings possess not only reasoning but the ability to realize when we have misunderstood something; gosh, maybe we could be wrong. The ability to recognize our mistakes and take a new path is commendable. There is too much staid language about energy independence at all costs that drives public opinion. Endangering our precious water sources, human- and wild- life while adding more heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere is not increasing national security. Don’t buy the rhetoric. Think for yourself.

In the last few days our local paper as well as the Huffington Post carried related articles that point to rapidly changing environmental conditions while we realize human health is changing in tandem. In Pensacola we have a black bear problem. These Florida natives are running out of habitat. Little vestiges of habitat (parks that once offered solace from the noise of the marketplace) shrink further in the name of progress. Since moving here in 2008 I’ve watched the horizon fill in with high rises, and any little stretch of forest planed for another enterprise.

Ariana Huffington published a long article yesterday from an international women’s conference in the UK focused on the redefining “success” which in its present definition is making us miserable. A parallel focus from the conference focused on the benefits of meditation. Health statistics for the UK are dramatic: 8 million people suffer from anxiety. The incidence of depression worldwide has risen to as many as 350 million according to the World Health Organization. In the U.S. antidepressants are commonly prescribed. After my father died I felt depressed.  My doctor recommended, you guessed, an antidepressant. I responded, “No thank you, I’d rather walk it off on the beach.”

So how are black bears, shrinking parks, depression and anxiety related? Turns out that humans need nature, open space, silence, and beauty to thrive. We are busily doing away with each of them and other species are in the wake.

Evidence of the vital connections between intact natural areas and human mental and physical health could fill this blog entry but its intuitive. No healthy human can deny they need some daily exposure to natural beauty to feel well. A life confined to an office and computer is a horrible life. Admit it. Even if you are playing a sport, like golf for instance, its the rolling green, the scent of warm earth under your cleats, the shade of trees and gurgling water that drop your heart rate, encourage you. Huffington suggests we redefine the meaning of success. She is palpating the Western cultural and Puritanical roots of our present day work ethic. It has planed forests, rerouted rivers, asphalted over Paradise with Pink Hotels to recall the old Joni Mitchell lyrics. We cannot continue to diminish nature without diminishing ourselves. Let’s mediate on that.

David Suzuki is a key environmental leader whom I trust and look to for clarity in these days of muddy commentary. The David Suzuki Foundation is Canada’s most effective environmental education and action center. The essay today poses a critical question relevant to these United States. We share the contiguous natural land, waters, and air that prevail on our shared continent and border.

More than 13 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product depends on healthy ecosystems, according to Environment Canada briefing notes obtained by Postmedia News. By contrast, the Harper government’s pet economic project, the Alberta oil sands, represents a mere two per cent. But is 13 per cent a reasonable estimate of the “value” of nature? With the current perspective that elevates the economy above all else, it’s important to find ways to include nature’s value in our calculations so it doesn’t get ignored in decision-making. At the same time, it seems absurd to try to assign worth to something so vital we can’t survive without it.

Read the full essay

It is more important to be excited, than to be filled with knowledge when we are young.

Rachel Carson developed a deep sense of wonder exploring the fields and woods near her childhood home in Springdale, Pennsylvania with her mother. Carson remembers being encouraged to explore nature. “I can remember no time when I wasn’t interested in the out of doors and the whole world of nature….Those interests I know I inherited from my mother and have always shared with her.”1

It was during the impressionable time of childhood that Carson’s invincible love and advocacy for nature was formed. In A Sense of Wonder — a book she wrote for her niece’s son Roger whom she raised after his mother’s untimely death — she describes her belief in the importance of developing an emotional tie to nature.

Once emotions have been aroused — a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love – then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.2

Parents, grandparents, and teachers can engender feelings of love and respect for the living world in young children by sharing their own surprise, wonder, and interest. It’s about sharing the experience rather than knowing the facts and figures! Carson would bundle Roger in warm blankets and take him down to the shore to see the moonlight shimmering on the shoreline of her West Southport, Maine summer home. Or, they put on slickers and huddled together during storms to feel the sea spray and wonder at the thundering waves crashing on the beach. She writes of spiders she “got to know” in woodpiles near the cabin. Carson’s own deep ties to nature sustained her through rigorous challenges later when Silent Spring caused a national uproar over pesticide use, and launched the environmental movement in the U.S. Even when her life was threatened she never swayed from her conviction that damage to nature did not have to be an inevitable consequence of technological progress.3

As parents and educators I think it is critical we pay attention to the message Rachel Carson so eloquently expressed. Learning and developmental theories indicate that we learn first through our senses, and indeed, memory is intricately tied to sensory traces in neuronal networks in the brain. We all have experienced a rush of memories — as fresh as the day we experienced them – when we smell a certain scent, or hear an old tune. When we educate children we must start with emotional and sensory experience. Children of course do this naturally in their explorations and we just need to follow their lead.

References:
1. Brooks, Paul (1972). Rachel Carson: The Writer at Work. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, p. 18.
2. Carson, Rachel (1965). A Sense of Wonder. New York: Harper & Row
Below is a Link to the film, A Sense of Wonder, which I highly recommend to readers.
A Sense of Wonder

i walked into a dappled wood
my troubles shed behind me
tatters on the soft path

the air was crisp and cool
the stones wet and shiny
little dog pranced ahead

i walked into a dappled wood
and found complete understanding
among the leaves and vines

when i returned renewed
i donned the garment lightly
to carry on and so forth