So yesterday I went to Steven Running's lecture on Global Warming. Professor Steven Running received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The people of the University were great in letting me capture the entire lecture on video, my audio patched directly into the university sound board. I'll have a video made up of lecture fragments up here soon.

The overwhelming sense I got from the lecture is... our world is falling to pieces. This sense has left me ruminating on thoughts of impermanence. Everything around us impermanent so why bother trying to hold on? Well as much as we ARE holding onto consumer habits, oil and gas depletion, and the resulting comfort zone, We ARE NOT holding onto the very thing that sustains us, we are not holding onto biological diversity, our ecosystems, clean water, clear air, you know the rant.. I've said it all before. So again it's paradoxical, while we need to let go to hold on, our current letting go of traditional knowledge and environmental consciousness and a willingness to be innovative instead of being comfortable is shattering our world.

I'm not a scientist, and I have huge issues with science and the compartmentalization of knowledge in a holistic universe, but that being said, I can't throw the obvious out the window. Throughout Professor Running's presentation the science is clear, and the evidence isn't based on single studies, but independent studies of independent natural systems. It's not just the glaciers that are telling us our climate is shifting, it's the oceans, the northern and southern ice packs, the rivers, the forests, and everything in between.

Now, I'm not making a film about global warming, I think global warming may be a moot point, but I AM interested in human behavior and how we are subject to nature's ebb and flow. I think our willingness to adapt is key to our survival, but what I don't see in this day and age, are those very important survival instincts at play. Regardless of the facts surrounding Global warming, we are not taking action. And we are not taking action on a number of fronts, forget the big picture, as a whole, we are not reversing trends of bottled water, we are not looking at our consumption rates, we are not taking control of our governments, we are basically just being complicit and letting go; letting someone else worry about it.

Newsflash: The powers that be, are more concerned with who is going to get through the upcoming mess alive, not in working together as a global community to find the necessary solutions. Hence documentation from the Pentagon within Steven's talk, citing Global Warming as a threat to national security.

I would propose that if all of us don't get out alive, none of us do. It's all or nothing. Everything and everyone is simply too interconnected.

At the beginning of Steven's talk he mentions Montana and the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, and how it left Montana covered in ash, but what most people at the time didn't notice is, only twelve days later, another layer of ash appeared. Well scientists like Steven were running trace experiments at the time and the conclusion was, it took only twelve days for that ash/air to circle the globe. Therefore what occurs in Iraq, Canada, the Arctic, or anywhere else on the globe may just affects us all. But maybe this isn't always apparent as we speed down the highway listening to Rush Limbaugh.

I heard this story recently, told to me by Narcisse Blood. Recently Yellowstone National Park reintroduced wolves into the landscape, and while there are innumerable impacts caused by this human intervention, the one that Narcisse spoke to was in relation to elk and their drinking habits. Before the wolves the elk would stand around in the rivers and streams, often along the banks, trampling plant life underfoot and thus causing significant erosion issues. Now, with the wolves back on the landscape, the elk only spend enough time near the river to get the drink they need, and then it's back into the dense bush. Thus the wolves have affected the elk, and in turn the plants along the river banks have returned; the erosion problems solved.

Anyways, I find all this quite obvious, as is the fact that we don't really seem to care, or have the impetus to change the patterns detrimental to our very existence. The scary part of the lecture, is not Global Warming.. what is scary is to see the predictions of what is to occur if we do nothing at all. Professor Running points to the high end of a climate change graph, "Here is where we end up if we continue with business as usual, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chose not to comment on that science, because frankly, we don't even know if the biosphere will be able to function at all by this stage."

peace,
d