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Need to Know: Science & Insight
, a new form of personal journalism that looks at what we
Need-to-Know
at this time of pandemic, existential crisis of climate change and unravelling of nature’s life supports.
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I guess the coach and school officials knew we didn’t stand a chance at the Canadian college basketball championships held one year in Lethbridge, Alberta. In the days before the championship started me and my teammates went on an educational tour in the Rocky Mountains.
Yes, instead of getting ready to play for a national championship we went to Banff. It was the best part of the entire experience. We had a great time and lost every game.
My clearest memory of that trip was our visit to the Columbia Icefield and the Athabasca Glacier. Tombstone-like markers showed where an enormous amount ice once covered the stony ground in years past. It was a long way to the ice face — perhaps a kilometer — as we walked past markers from 1920 and 1930.
I didn’t know anything about climate change or global warming then. In fact the terms had only been coined a year or two before. Nor did I have any intention of becoming a journalist. Many years later as I struggled to explain climate change in one of my first articles, I remembered that long walk to the glacier past all those markers. I wrote something like: “Visiting a glacier you can see global warming with your own eyes.”
In the last week I wrote two articles about new research on glaciers:
All 220,000 glaciers on our planet are melting at an accelerating rate. A long-time glaciologist told me there are going to be “hair-raising” impacts on people and society today and in future.
Glacier and ice sheet meltwater has shifted the Earth’s Axis and the North and South poles
So that visit to the Athabasca Glacier turned out to be very educational for me. My thanks to Seneca College for a completely unforeseeable, life-altering trip.
Need-to-Know 1: Glaciers everywhere are melting at an accelerating rate
Glaciers continue to be climate change we can see with our eyes but there are many other visible “markers” now: sea-level rise, extreme weather, coral bleaching, and so on. Scientists now call this era “The Anthropocene” to reflect the massive impacts humans have had on the Earth such as shifting the axis of the entire planet. That’s a tough one to wrap your head around.
Need-to-Know 2: It’s easy to see climate change with our own eyes unless your head is stuck in the sand or somewhere else.
We should all be very nervous about this. We don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t even understand how big of an impact we’re having. Nor what some of the impacts are or could be. As Nobel prize-winning scientist Brian Schmidt said a few days ago:
“Humanity is taking colossal risks with our common future.
Decisions made now will affect the long-term stability of Earth’s biosphere.
There is still time, but only if we take decisive action.”
Schmidt is echoing the views of many Nobel prize winners and leading experts who convened a special Nobel Prize Summit “Our Planet, Our Future” this past week.
Need-to-Know 3: On our current path we’re taking colossal risks
I listened in on many of the sessions, and it gave me lots to think about. You can read their “Urgent Call for Action” statement here. It’s an outline for effective planetary stewardship, so worth a few minutes of your time.
Let me say this from a non-expert perspective:
You and I, and most people in fact, know we’re in trouble.
We know we’re wasteful as a society and that the current economic system is keeping us on a disastrous path.
We know we’re going down the wrong path and understand we need to change direction.
We know we need to do a lot of things differently.
We generally know what needs to be done: Shift to renewable energy, protect oceans and forests; reduce plastic use; cut back on meat consumption and material consumption generally; and a bunch of other stuff.
In order to do those things, to put humanity on a safe, equitable path to planetary stewardship we need a clear vision of the amazing world we can create. I made a bit of stab at it in an NtK issue about 100% renewable energy by 2030:
Suddenly, or so it will seem, almost all vehicles on the roads will be electric, the air will be fresher and the streets quieter as you silently pull up to curb on your electric-bike where the parking meter is also a charging station.
That’s where we’re going in less time than you think.
I find it hard to articulate the details of that much better world I know we can reach. And it’s not just me. I talked to some social scientists a few years back about my frustration on this issue. They told me the path to a truly sustainable future is through the muddy waters of emotions, values, ethics, and most importantly, imagination.
"When we talk about sustainability we are talking about the future, how things could be. This is the landscape of imagination," said John Robinson of University of British Columbia.
"If we can't imagine a better world we won't get it”.
— Building Sustainable Future Needs More Than Science, Experts Say
Need-to-Know 4: Imagination is the key to creating the world we want
Imagine if we all truly understood we are part of nature and utterly dependent on nature for our well being? Most importantly, imagine if we all understood how nature functions?
With that understanding, imagine how different our decisions and activities would be? We would be oh-so-careful not to damage the natural world unless absolutely necessary because we’d be doing harm to ourselves. That is what we are doing as we aware only beginning to realize.
This is what eminent University of Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta meant when he said “We all need to be naturalists” at the Nobel conference. Dasgupta recently completed a landmark report “The Economics of Biodiversity”. It’s huge, so here is a link to its main messages.
And here’s some final thoughts Dasgupta shared from his economist perspective:
We are embedded in nature.
Nature is our most precious asset
All of us are in a real sense asset managers. We are not managing well and often not managing at all.
Markets don’t work. Nor will good governance be enough.
We all need to be naturalists.
Need-to-Know 5: We all need to be naturalists.
Until next time, stay strong and stay safe.
Stephen