In my last article I talked about how the greenhouse gases being higher today than they have been for over 3 million years. The temperature of our planet is warmed by about 1 degree C. Initially the planet warmed by a ½ degree or 6/10 degree. So today, it is plain as day that we have changed the temperature of our planet and it is getting warmer faster all the time. Alaska’s Mere Glacier in 1941 had to be relabeled Mere Lake in 2004 and the Artic Ocean that is usually covered in sea ice year around has been melting year by year. It is speculated that in a decade will have the ice free artic months in all of time. We are seeing a planet radically transformed by our actions. And again, this all became possible in the last 50 years or so. Scientist often called this time the great acceleration. We’ve seen population increase, urbanization, and globalization. We then started clearing eco systems like forest and we built up more and more farms around the world. We started building huge dams and using more and more water. We used more fertilizer and chemicals especially in agriculture and industry. Those changed the nature of our water even at the scale of the oceans. We are farming the oceans. We are harvesting more fish than ever and doing more aquaculture or fish farms than we ever seen. The big scary thing that happening is climate change. Our use of energy, clearing of land and a few other things have changed the nature of the entire atmosphere. These changes are going to make the planet warmer and if we keep going this way, it’s going to be a massive disruption to everything! Not just the thermometers, not just the polar bears but Us!
In fact climate change will harm the most vulnerable people among us. People living right on the edge of poverty or food security or having fresh water or good places to live. Climate change will burden future generations. These are your children, grandchildren and people that aren’t even born yet! We could be leaving a gigantic mess on their doorstep that could last for centuries or thousands of years. Now I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you took all of this information and said this looks really grim or even hopeless. But let’s just stop and think, it’s not hopeless at all! A lot of things are getting better but at the same time the environmental situation is getting worse. During the last 50 years humans have gotten healthy. We used to live to be 55 years old, today people live to be over 70 years old. We also see that women are having fewer children than they did 50 years ago. These children are healthier and have more opportunities than they’ve had before. We also see the world is far more literate than it’s ever been. We’re also more urban, more mobile and more connected than ever before. This is an interesting paradox. Some things are getting better, some are getting worse.
So what is the future going to be? Is it going to be a planetary disaster or is it going to be awesome, like a Star Trek Movie where we pull ourselves out of this mess and build an incredible opportunity? Well, the answer is that it’s up to you, it’s up to all of us! We can build the future we want! We don’t know what it’s going to be because we haven’t built it yet! We get to choose the future we want! So we have to choose a good one! We can still build a world where people and nature thrive today and tomorrow. To get there, we are going to have to do the hardest thing of all. We are going to have to step back as a people and make our choice. We have to choose between the people we are or the people we can be! So which one are you going to choose? The future of our world depends on our answer.
~Donna DeRemer-Hissrich
Spiritual Director/Pachamama Alliance Facilitator
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