I am here to discuss Climate Change and how I am going to address one of the world’s biggest problems. I want to set the stage in how this moment in Climate Change got started in the first place. This started along time ago when our early ancestors started to effect the environment but they did it locally. One of the things that happened is that there are a lot more people on the planet. There is over 7 billion people walking the earth today and climbing. We also for the first time became an urban species. Over half the people live in the city. We also formed a global economy and international trade that has been growing faster than ever. During the last 50 years we see a doubling global population. So think about that, twice as many people doing about 6 times more stuff. So that means we are consuming 3 times more food, almost double the amount of water and almost 3 times more fossil fuels than we did back in 1970. Unfortunately, this change in us is changing the planet that is terribly disruptive. Some of these changes you can see by just looking out the window, there obvious, there really right in front of you.
For example when we cut down a forest and the whole area has been turned into soybean fields. Then the soybeans are being shipped all of the way to China to be used as animal feed. So global economy connecting the Amazon to Chinese pigs and is clearing rain forest in a remote part of the world. This is happening everywhere! So about 30 percent of the world’s tropical forests, have been lost. And a lot that has happened in the last few decades.
We also see how agriculture, just farming is changing the world. We usually think of farming on a small scale, like an individual farmer’s field. We can walk through it, pull up a carrot and look at the cows but, agriculture now is a global forest. If we look at the map in satellite you would see the earth is covered in agriculture. Agriculture now covers 35-40 percent of the world’s land. It is now the largest eco system on earth and ranks 16th in climate change.
We are also changing the nature of water across the planet. We are a pretty thirsty species. We use a lot of water in our homes and we also use water in industry but most of our water is used in agriculture. About 70 percent of the water we take out of nature is used for irrigation. Our thirst for water has disrupted water resources across the globe. So all of these changes we have seen are right in front of us. Other changes are a bit more subtle, especially changes to our atmosphere and to the climate of our planet.
In the 1800’s we began activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and the explosion of agriculture that started changing the nature of our atmosphere. We saw the greenhouse gas began to increase from the 1800’s until about now by 50 percent. Today greenhouse gases are higher today than they have been for over 3 million years. Next time I will talk about how the greenhouse gases going up causes the temperature of the planet to go up.
~Donna DeRemer-Hissrich
Spiritual Director/Pachamama Alliance Facilitator
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