A Whole Bunch of Bloggers +1 on Climate Change
Oct 15th, 2009 by David Svet
This post is part of Blog Action Day: Bloggers vs. Climate Change sponsored by Change.org
I am not a scientist. I am not an expert on climate change. I am just a guy in Kansas. But, I get to travel some and what I see causes me great concern. The world continues to industrialize at a dizzying pace. The human population continues to explode, as does our need for food, shelter, water, transportation, goods, and services. As a result, we are scaring the earth at an unsustainable pace.
I’m a woodworker. I don’t buy tropical hardwoods anymore. They are being forested into nonexistence. Mahogany can’t even be imported to the United States anymore because loggers are using GPS and satellite imaging to locate and log it so fast that it has become an endangered species. As the logging continues the rainforests that produce the lumber is being destroyed. Removing a single mahogany tree destroys hundreds of yards of forest surrounding the tree because it removes the high canopy over the forest floor. The result is devastating to the ecosystem.
I’m a scuba diver. Coral reefs that I dove a few years ago are now ghost reefs — their coral is bleached white and dead from the rising temperature of the ocean. When the reefs die, the fish die from one end of the food chain to the other. People are attached to that food chain. If the coral dies, we will go with it. This change is happening beneath the surface of the ocean out of sight and out of mind. The end result could be devastating — a dead ocean.
I am not a scientist, but I am not blind and I am not ignorant. We are in a dire situation. We have everything we need to remedy the situation except the resolve to do so. To stay the course is murder/suicide. To wholly embrace change is the path to life. I choose life.
