MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 26 April
2008
Earth Day 2008:
The state of the planet
April
22 was Earth Day. It was preceded
last Sunday by national events which galvanized millions around the world
behind Earth Day's global warming action theme. Today's Springfest in Fayetteville will have an Earth Day
orientation, including an "eco-carnival" put on by the Omni Center
for Peace, Justice, and Ecology, in the Walton Arts Center's rose garden, with
polar bears and free snow cones.
So walk, jog, bicycle, or even drive if you must, down to Dickson Street
and join in the joy of bein' green!
American
Heritage Magazine called the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, "one of
the most remarkable happenings in the history of democracy." According to
Senator Gaylord Nelson, organizer of the event, "Earth Day worked because
of spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize the 20
million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that
participated. That was the
remarkable thing about Earth Day.
It organized itself."
You
can learn more about Earth Day 2008 at earthday.net, where you can tune into
messages by Chevy Chase and Kevin Bacon and lots of other neat stuff.
Given
the state of the planet, every day needs to be Earth Day. Happily, something like this is
beginning to happen. Large
greening movements began in most industrialized countries over a decade ago,
focusing especially on global warming.
But global warming didn't become a widespread American concern until
2006 when Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" brought this issue
home to millions. American action
on global warming was delayed at least ten years by a well-financed propaganda
campaign led by Exxon-Mobil and other large energy and automotive firms, and by
the anti-environmental policies of President Bush.
Selfishness,
irrationality, and apathy have led the planet into dire straits on this Earth
Day. Human numbers, a driver of all the other impacts,
are overrunning the planet.
Humankind took some 6 million years to reach, in 1825, a population of
one billion. We reached the second
billion 105 years later, and the third billion 30 years after that. Earth's carrying capacity has
been estimated at around 4 billion, but today's
population is 6.7 billion and burgeoning toward 10 billion during this
century. We have now
appropriated 40 percent of the planet's total plant growth, transformed or
degraded nearly 50 percent of the planet's land, driven 66 percent of marine
fisheries to extinction or overexploitation, caused harmful marine algal blooms
worldwide, appropriated more than half of Earth's accessible fresh runoff
water, caused many of the world's major rivers to run dry before reaching the
sea, dried up or shrunk many of the world's major lakes including Lake
Superior, interfered enormously in the nitrogen cycle, introduced invasive
species that are changing the planet's biology, and brought on Earth's sixth
great extinction (the fifth was 65 million years ago) with species being
exterminated at 100 to 1000 times the natural rate.
But
the clearest and most dangerous signal of human impact is the increase, since
the fossil fuel age began around 1800, in atmospheric carbon dioxide
(CO2). Data de-coded from cores
drilled into Antarctic ice show that the atmospheric CO2 concentration has
climbed to 40 percent above any level of the past 800,000 years, a time that
extends backward through many ice-age cycles.
It's
a moral issue: What kind of planet
do you want for your descendents?
And the impacts aren't all in the future: Recent deadly heat waves in Europe, dying coral reefs, the
northward spread of tropical diseases, melting mountain glaciers worldwide,
shrinking snowpack in the western United States, droughts in the southwestern
and southeastern United States, a disappearing ice cap over the Arctic Ocean,
and probably Hurricane Katrina, are consequences of global warming.
Scientists
such as James Hansen, NASA's chief climate scientist and a leading global
warming expert, note that Greenland's ice is vanishing and the sub-continent is
nearing a "reflectivity flip" where the reduced reflectivity brought
about when ice is replaced by darker land and water surfaces could cause an irreversible
sequence of melting and warming, leading by the end of this century to a
15-foot ocean rise that will flood the planet's coastlines and "produce a
different planet." Hansen and
others give us 10 to 20 years to seriously reduce our CO2 emissions, before reaching
such an irreversible "tipping point" beyond which our warming climate
might, like Frankenstein's monster, spin out of human control.
Western
religions teach that, if we are "good" here on Earth, we will go to a
heavenly reward. What we need to
realize is that heaven is right here on Earth. Nature has given us life, a gorgeous planet, a universe
beyond all imagining, and a brain capable of understanding some of this. With our newfound (during just the past
10,000 years) technologies, the entire human population could easily live like
queens and kings if we would only use our brains. What more do we want?
But too many of us cannot appreciate what we've been freely given. Too many of us want more: more children, more electricity, more
cars, more house, more power, more money.
Too many of us are afraid to use our distinguishing human faculty, our
rational brains, relying instead on our emotions and our traditions. So we clutch tightly to our material
belongings and our weapons and our irrational ideologies and we march
thoughtlessly forward, sleepwalking really, and with every step we grind a
little more of our heaven into dust beneath our feet.
It's time to make every day Earth Day.