earth refuge environmental journalism blog

Re/Solve: Climate Change

2/4/2013

Historical photo courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management, USA

We, none of us, ever know when we are living in the moment that will be pointed to in time to come as the defining moment. We might have a vague feeling that our daily lives are, to borrow from 20th C history, similar to the days of living in the 'tinderbox of Europe' or the last days of the Belle Epoch. But we don't know until the War to End All Wars has come and gone and we are on the other side of it, that we were on a precipice, having 'lived' through the ravages History creates in our lives, whether in families or in nations or in the world wholly. Surely then, as now, there were warning voices for decades before such large scale changes that made "History" took place. And surely then, as now, the people hearing them heeded or ignored, worried and debated, and no doubt felt too small to do much of anything to change the forces of such global change.

I feel strongly that this, too, is one of those times. In observing all the evidence discovered, reported on and written about during my own long career as a conservation journalist, these last 30 years reveal all the signs of warnings, worries, and moments of opportunities gone unheeded by us in meeting the imbalance our industrial society has pressed upon our natural Home and Habitat.

I was going to write about volcanoes and whether they are good or bad for climate change for this blog . . . but I found the geologic and atmospheric research so profoundly sad and the amount we now know about the Earth's natural forces so profoundly amazing, that I instead resolved to look for good, for change, for a moment of brilliance in environmental solutions rather than just more sad, bad news.

After decades of writing about the environment, the wilderness, the Land and loss of wildlife, reporting on such omni-disasters takes its toll on the soul; constantly ringing alarm bells make one as welcome as the original Pandora. A bit — actually a lot — of news that speaks to human creativity and resolve in meeting and solving our challenges is badly needed.

I have in mind to create a new environmental magazine or journal, much in the pattern of our fabulous Buzzworm, to be titled Re/Solve. It will focus on solutions — to conservation disasters, micro- and macro-shambles occurring, whether in village, city, valley, wilderness or range — offering not just the small and mostly insufficient actions offered elsewhere, but real solutions to real global problems. There are so many great minds working on these.

And in setting out on this course, I found this recent Ted talk by Allan Savory. . .

Ironically, I met Allan Savory over 25 years ago — when as a young staff reporter for Newsweek, I was trying to change national journalism from within to create a 'news-beat' on environmental and conservation issues, and on environment as national (and international) security. It hadn't really been done at the national scale in the late 1970s and early 1980s and certainly not by a female back then.

In attempting this, I relentlessly sent 'environmental' stories to my beleaguered and patient editors at Newsweek, Allan being among the many. While I wrote 5,000 word articles on the emerging, complex environmental issues, my editors dutifully reworked them into 750-word boxed features, save for drought and desertification of our nation's agricultural lands. For that we achieved an award-winning cover article and I an early reporting award.

Allan had recently emigrated from Zimbabwe and was working on the damaged and desertified rangelands of my native Rocky Mountain West. His ideas for ending desertification of rangelands were shocking at the time – more livestock, not less — but I watched as his calm insistence in hotel conference rooms and meeting halls, small town by small town, won over ranchers throughout the Intermountain West.

Now I see here that Allan has an idea — a brilliance based on his life's very important work — that will no doubt prove to be an even more important answer to climate change, writ global.

He offers an approach, a solution, a something regions, localities, individuals and nations can do. And his calm insistence that he is profoundly right demonstrates the kind of resolve I hope to grace the coverage of my forthcoming dream project of Re/Solve. What goes around ... goes around.

Take time to absorb this great solution, as nearly a million others watching TED already have... For Allan, it represents a lot of years of work. Thank you for your persistence, Allan!

http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change.html

I'll be posting this at my other bloc: Earth: Sacred/Possession as well, because it's so important...

Whether the Weather ... part one

5/2/2013

The BBC and the New York Times noted recently that the weather, worldwide, is in a state of extreme extremes. NASA noted the Pacific Ocean, a behemoth driver of global weather, is in a "La Nada" state — essentially neutral — and what's next in our coming weather forecasts is any human's guess.

From flooding rains, heavy snow, and hell freezing over in northern Europe to raging fires, drought and heat exceeding all recorded temperatures, everywhere on our Earth, the shorthand term for these extremes of amazing weather is misery.

Whether this a "new normal" or a bad stretch of crummy weather, we are reminded of the old tongue-twister:

Whether the weather be mild or whether the weather be not,
Whether the weather be cold or whether the weather be hot,
We'll weather the weather whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not.

And indeed that's the rub, isn't it: We have to put up, endure, survive and somehow plan to do the business of commerce and of our lives, despite whatever Nature's weather cycles throw at us, from super-storms to super-fires, whether we like it or not, and regardless of international consensus followed by actions taken to attempt to slow climate change, should such a miracle ever happen.

From Mesopotamia to the Maya to new but old predictions from MIT, bad weather is found at the root of social collapse. It's really very simple: drought, unstable food supply, lack of water and extreme weather result in large scale misery and wars and social collapse-- for the lucky ones, migration to somewhere else — have ruled human history's lists of winners and losers. Add to the list of losers in such times wildlife, natural habitat unable to rejuvenate quickly (two the three decades is quickly; two or three hundred years more realistic) due to overuse and degradation and, well, it's quite a mess for our plugged-in children who know little to nothing about survival techniques of a wild Nature.

As an article in Scientific American last spring quoted Dennis Meadows, Professor Emeritus of systems policy at the University of New Hampshire and the former head of the MIT team behind the then-radical — and now radically omnicient — report entitled Limits to Growth (1972):

"'I see collapse happening already,' [Meadows] says. 'Food per capita is going down, energy is becoming more scarce, groundwater is being depleted.' Most worrisome, Jorgen Randers [another of the MIT original modelers and author of the new book 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years] notes, greenhouse gases are being emitted twice as fast as oceans and forests can absorb them. Whereas in 1972 humans were using 85 percent of the regenerative capacity of the biosphere to support economic activities such as growing food, producing goods and assimilating pollutants, the figure is now at 150 percent—and growing."

So what's a community to do, whether New York City and the East Coast of the US, the land mass known as Australia, the teeming populations of Rio sweltering this winter at 109 degrees or northern Europe freezing at 50 degrees below zero? Is there any reasonable way for any community to "plan" for our new 'normal' of extremes?

This is the challenge before us, regardless of location and regardless of whether the planners are in small communities, large crop-producing bread-baskets of the world, urban areas with millions of people or coastal-dwellers facing rising sea waters or salinization of fresh water rivers. Planning for such large-scale weather extremes is daunting, and raises interesting and important questions:

Whose responsibility is it, do you think, to plan a response for these ongoing weather events that are stretching budget and resources?

Do you think Government, whether local or national, should lead response planning?
Might Government-sized emergency response units, whether at the NGO level or a national government level be the responsible party?
How about your local first responders?
Or is action and planning to be taken at a neighborhood or family level?

How are you planning to begin sorting out your business or family response for the extreme weather showing up at your doorstep and to whom do you expect to appeal for help when the weather hits hard in your home territory?

Part Two will consider what a plan for extreme weather might consider...To Come.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/science/earth/extreme-weather-grows-in-frequency-and-intensity-around-world.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=apocalypse-soon-has-civilization-passed-the-environmental-point-of-no-return

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/lanada20130206.html

Seeing the Forest for a Species

2/1/2012

Grizzly bears on tracking cam. Courtesy of USFWS.

The US Ninth Court of Appeals recently ruled that Grizzly Bears in the Yellowstone area must remain protected as an threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, because a main food source for the largest mammal of our North American forests is being wiped out by pine beetle and drought, maladies laid at the feet of climate change. Until the US FWS can establish a measure of the threat posed by the complex relationship between the grizzly and its important Autumn food source in white pine nuts, the bear will remain listed.

It's an example of the depth and complexity of the problem of habitat before us -- rapid climate change leading to swaths of dead habitat throughout a region the size of South Carolina, leaving the wildlife of the area without a vital source food at a time of feeding for winter. How do we preserve a forest, a habitat of such size as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, much less an Arctic habitat for the polar bear. The size of change taking place with climate change is truly unfathomable; that it is happening at a rate several times faster than what was predicted should chill us all. But this change is largely out of sight of the mainstream urban populations, thus 37 percent of Americans maintain that climate change is a figment of scientists' imaginations, a number largely unchanged since last May, in a study by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communications. "A Gallup poll from last month found that Americans rated global warming as the environmental problem they worry about the least," noted US News in August 2011.

Perhaps one of these Americans could explain this disbelief to a starving grizzly bear in the Yellowstone area. Pregnant females are needing to eat high calorie foods to survive a winter of bearing her young. The bear is an amazing animal -- if the female runs out of sufficient calories while hibernating, her young do not make it to term within her. If there are barely calories enough to carry to term, the female can easily starve while the young are born, nursing as she still hibernates before the spring thaws of the high mountains reach her snow-bound den, rousing her to search for food. The grizzly is a beautiful creatures and one is lucky to ever get to watch their care of their young in the wild, as I was once honored to see on an early morning in Yellowstone. On an early June morning, a female gently swatted her lagging, playful cubs into rolling balls of fur over the far mountain meadow, urging them to the safety of the white pine forest before the sun and danger of discovery rose any higher. In seeing such moments, the breath stopes at seeing and feeling the wild thrive in our ruled and paved world; we will be poorer without the bears, or the vast pine forests, or the complex web of habitat and wildlife it supports.

http://www.fws.gov/mountain-prairie/pressrel/11-71.htmlhttp://www.actionbioscience.org/environment/loganmacfarlane.html
http://environment.yale.edu/climate/

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2011/04/27/do-americans-care-about-climate-change-anymore

Lost Souls of the Soviet-era Environmentalism

6/12/2011

I am searching for Fyodor Morgoun, Mila Popova and other of the scientists who were so gracious to host me twenty-two years ago in Moscow when I covered the first-ever assembly held on the health of the environment and agricultureal lands of the once (and perhaps future) Soviet Union.

Like so many of us who were working on environmental issues before the 'net,' as prescient and brilliant SciFi writer Connie Willis called her own form of timetravel the late 1990s, they have not yet surfaced on the wwweb. What did happen to those committed, passionate and, I dare say, brave environmental activists, scientists and citizens who filled the vast hall during that week of discovery and dismay? They had gathered to find out what the Truth was about the state of the environment and agricultural lands in their vast home, coming from the Baltics to Siberia and converging in Moscow to weep in dismay at what was openly reported in those first, fragile moments of Glasnost created by Mr. Gorbachev.

Did those brave and caring souls give up? Are they continuing to fight in the trenches, as they were then? Has progress been made?

Stay tuned here, as I begin my own journey to find them and to find out how the environment of Russia and other former-member-states of the Soviet Union have fared, what initiatives have been undertaken and what successes, if any, are underway. I am hopeful, as I see that the USFWS and a senior delegation from the Russian Ministry of the Environment met in June to discuss the future welfare of the wildlife we share, such as the Alaska, Chukota polar bear population (no, it's not just another 'cute' and gratuitous polar bear photo aimed to attract your attention. Well, not totally.).

In the meantime, if in honor of the new elections indicating Mr. Putin will retain power and especially in honor of those demonstrating in Red Square as a people wishing to retain a fair democratic vote and the ability to ask questions and demand the Truth in their beloved nation, if you'd like to read the original article I wrote in 1990, contact me! I'll send you an actually readable copy of the coverage (you can see excerpts of it in my portfolio pages). I'd love to hear from you!

Image courtesy of USFWS

BioEmpathy

18/11/2011

0 Comments

The polar bears (above) have returned, pacing day after day, to this beach on an island in the Arctic Sea where they are marooned. The are looking for the sea ice their mothers and the mothers of their mothers taught them was their way to survive. Day after day they are finding the sea ice is not there. The Guardian ran this photo gallery in November 2011, with stunning photos by Will Rose and Kasja Sjolander.
(source http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2011/nov/16/stranded-polar-bears-alaska-in-picture)

Some Definitions:

Biophilia: Eric Fromm (1964) reimagined by the equally brilliant biologist Edward O. Wilson, introducing the ancient concept — some might even say primitive or indigenous or mythic (and not meaning these are the same thing) — of a human innate love of our bios, our habitat, our living world, from the cute and cuddly to the breathtaking beauty of forests, ocean, sky, natural spaces. It is a Love of the Garden, as I like to call it, in all its wildness, resilience, force, and tear-inspiring awe. We have left the Garden so completely, and thrown ourselves into the black, outer-world of exile where there is much gnashing of teeth, that Wilson offered us a reminder that such care, even such love, of our natural world is a natural, ingrained response within us. At Lexic.com it is noted that the medical definition of biophilia is the instinct for self-preservation (love of one's life).

BioMimicry: Coming soon in 3.8, helping us to discover — again, as our ancestors knew so well — that as Nature progresses she teaches us to evolve or survive, reconnect and hopefully resolve our destructive tendencies to come (return?) to a way of living that is more sustainable in the face of the laws of Nature. Put in Nature's way of work: Evolve or Die; To Be (Clever), or Not To Be.

BioEthics: Boiled down greatly to a decision of how an individual chooses (or is forced) to live or die in the medical sphere. Perhaps it should have meant what has become known as Environmental Ethics, a wilderness in which we are led by the brilliance of Holmes Rolston III, among others, in considering how (not whether) Nature has standing and thus value -- just because it exists -- in our human system of values. Also consider BioCentrism, as explored by Paul Taylor in the age of environmental enlightenment of the 1970s and 1980s, as an attempt to balance our species' plague of anthropocentrism.

Biocide: Traditionally a means developed by scientists to kill off living organisms, presumably the ones humans choose to be dangerous or a distraction. Of course, with little movement on this slippery slope, we find ourselves wonder whether we are also killing off our bios, our habitat in which case it transmogrifies to suicide.

BioEmpathy: The Institute for the Future defines it as "The ability to see things from Nature's point of view" and is offered in business as a leadership strategy.

I would add another meaning, however. BioEmpathy is not only the ability to see things from Nature's point of view, but also the ability to feel what the object of our focus in Nature is feeling in any given moment. BioEmpathy means to allow ourselves to feel the suffering, the sorrow and the mourning, em pathos, in understanding and suffering, just as the "other" feels.

In the instance of these polar bears, BioEmpathy is to be willing, able and strong enough in Spirit to allow your self to feel the pain of hunger these bears feel after weeks of being unable to leave the island in the Arctic Sea. It is to allow yourself to feel their fear and bewilderment at the startling recognition that their "normal" way to leave this island in the middle of the Arctic is not there, and that they are starving.

In the face of this choice of starve or swim in search for sea ice, some polar bears strike out into the ocean, their adaptation as strong swimmers and instinct to survive leading them on. In the case of at least 8 bears discovered floating dead in the Arctic Sea by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, led by their will to live, these beautiful, powerful creatures drowned during their swim to survive. They died trying. We have no way of knowing how many more of these magnificent mammals are lost each day of each month while trying to survive long enough to adapt to the new conditions of their Polar habitat.

Lost.

Doesn't that word alone invoke feelings of desperation and desolation within you, and within your spirit?

Can you feel the bears' hunger? Can you feel their confusion at what to do next?

Can you empathize with what they feel at what they see: in this case no way out and no "normal" Way of survival?

Are you brave enough to feel this — and does it cause a few tears to well in your eyes for these polar bears' situation?

If so, that is BioPhilia -- love of life and love of self-preservation. For you are then feeling alive and connected to another mammal who lives with you on our Earth, our habitat and home, our Garden and Life-Support.

It is only when we can be strong enough to feel as these bears do and to feel their lurch of desperation in our own hearts and a cry of panic in our own spirits, that we then also feel the impetus and inspiration to change and nurture their future — the future of so much of our Garden habitat that we love — and thus change and nurture our shared and common life in our Earth home.

We are able to do something about global warming. You are, and I am.

They cannot.

We are able to do something to lessen or even halt the spread of pollution in their habitat and the invisible leaching of PCB's through their water. You are, and I am.

They cannot.

Let's do this — Now.

0 Comments

Looking Forward and Backward: 20 years into Climate Change Response

14/10/2011

In the winter of 1990, I contacted Stephen Schneider, then a bright young atmospheric scientist at NCAR here in Colorado and a bit of a provocative scientist with his message that the global climate was warming. I called to ask him to write ‘what everyone needs to know about this global warming thing”— and to do it in 800 words or less. Typical of his intense willingness to do whatever necessary, he simply responded, ‘Yes.’ And when did I need it?

And he did, of course, deliver for that was Dr. Schneider gave to us, always an enthusiastic 'Yes' to the oppotrunity to explain the unexplainable to a public he was sure would be sensible enough to take action. That was 20 years ago however, as the article appeared in the Jan/Feb 1991 issue of Buzzworm, where I was editorial creative and managing editor.

With Dr. Schneider's tragic passing last year as he was mid-way across Europe, racing between climate meetings, I am sadly unable to check back in with him to see if his enthusiasm that people would do the right thing had dimmed at all, or worse had become an estimation of improbable. Indeed I so wish to know what his 20-year lesson would be after all his tireless and enthusiastic work to alert us to the climate fate before us.

His serious challenge to us in 1991 was the sobering reminder that:

“Human civilization, which developed over the past 10,000 years, has not experienced a planet more than one to two degrees warmer than present.”

And, in case we didn’t get the drift of what he was saying:

“Transitions in nature typically take 5,000 to 10,000 years; a climate change of several degrees in a century is at least 10 times, and perhaps 100 times, more rapid on a globally sustained basis than average natural change. This raises the specter of considerable disruption to natural ecological systems, human agriculture and water supplies, threatens to raise sea levels, or intensify hurricanes and could cause unknown alterations to human and animal health. . . “

That was amazing predictive science 20 years ago; how stunning — if not a little frightening — to witness in our days now the accuracy of his understanding then.

And he wrote, ever hopeful, that “solutions can be found which do not require major unacceptable concessions from either side” of the developed/developing nation divide of who gets access to use fossil fuels to power their economies and who does not. But he ominously added, “at least for a period of a decade or so.”

We are now a decade past his decade window of opportunity in which to take reasonable action to slow global warming, as we called this new concept then. Yet still the inaction and stasis continues on the international political stage, as we creak toward attempting agreement after agreement to reduce carbon emissions, and the U.S. is at the head of the pack of heel-draggers.

At what point is it more painful not to make changes in the way our society lives daily than it is to take the risk of ameliorating the situation, with all we’ve got to throw at it? Isn't this a conservative response to a global threat?

I feel one reason many of us in the world revere Steve Jobs is that he, as a business leader, gave us products and solutions we wanted before we even knew we needed them. Would that a great entrepreneur could offer the same business response to providing climate solutions.

My younger teen daughter, a child of the Apple generation, has a consistent observation at the plethora of news shows, presidential debates and the horrors of Friday-night political talk shows that skirt the edge of her present reality as she plans her life ahead: “Who are all those old guys and why are they making decisions that are ruining my future world?”

This is encouraging to me, as part of the needed political-climate-change is the willingness of a new generation to get outraged, get effective and to get vocal and stand up; it's time for them to demand the older American generation currently in boardrooms and in Washington to take action on this global threat — or get out of the way. And mostly this new generation needs to insist we stop locking them into having few other choices than mere survival in a strained, hot global habitat where extremes in weather endanger food and water supplies, flood our cities and super-cell storms, winds and fire the norm.

Perhaps that’s what 20 years has given us since we first learned of this global warming thing: There is a new generation willing to take seriously — and to take action — what Prof. Schneider, along with the many other scientists who were clever enough to follow the dots of a global climate, advise is necessary to undertake as a local community and a global community.

It’s time to allow a new generation of innovators to move us forward. They do not seem so impeded by political stalemates based on ‘the way it was’ or by an out-of-date notion that it is still possible for any one nation to “win” any kind of economic advantage in a world where every nation’s habitat is trashed and we are all merely surviving from one extreme crisis to another.

A small book on where we stand was published last summer. It is thought to be Stephen Schneider’s last or near last word on what we do — Now and Next — and it was co-written with Michael D. Mastandrea. It’s as close as I’ll be able to get to understand his 20-year lesson for us and since he was ahead of most of us 20 years ago, maybe we should mark his advice now:

"It is also clear, however, that mitigation will not be enough to address the climate problem. Even with aggressive global efforts to reduce emissions, the earth's climate will continue to change significantly for many decades at least, due to past emissions and the inertia of social and physical systems. Significant impacts resulting from climate change are already evident, and they pose increasing risks for many vulnerable populations and regions.

"Alongside mitigation, then, we also need policies focused on adaptation, on making sensible adjustments to the unavoidable changes that we now face. And we must coordinate adaptation with mitigation, as the success of each will depend on the other. Today's efforts to reduce emissions will, in due course, determine the severity of climate change, and thus the degree of adaptation required -- or even possible -- in the future. At the same time, a better understanding of the levels of climate change to which adaptation is difficult will help to shape our judgments about how much mitigation is required…."

"Slowing down pressure on the climate system and addressing the needs of marginalized countries and groups are the main `insurance policies' we have against potentially dangerous, irreversible climate events and the injustices that inevitably will accompany them. As the world struggles to fashion fair and effective forms of mitigation, adaptation, too, will be essential if we are to avoid the worst consequences of climate change."

A review and connect to the book can be found here: http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2010/10/17/preparing-for-climate-change-steve-schneider/

Elizabeth Darby

An award-winning environmental journalist, writer and editor covering issues of wildlife, wilderness, eco-geo-politics and issues of women, children and development for 25 years.

_

I would add another meaning. . . . Bio-Empathy is not only the ability to see things from Nature's point of view, but also the ability to feel what the object of our focus in Nature is feeling in any given moment.

Bio-Empathy means to allow ourselves to feel the suffering, the sorrow and the mourning, em pathos, in order to understand better. It means to allow ourselves to feel just as the "other" feels, whether starving bear, heat-stressed tree, or water-depleted raccoon in Texas's drought.