Melting Away the Environment

Imagine Manhattan suddenly breaking loose and rushing out to sea. It seems like an inplausible scenario and perhaps it mostly is something that will only exist in Hollywood fantasy movies but it's not all fiction. Recently a 19-square mile ice sheet broke off the 4,500 year-old Markham Ice Shelf in the northern Arctic. What is significant about this in comparison to previous ice shelf breakages that have been going on literally for eons is that there is little to no chance of the ice reforming as it has for those same eons. The difference now being that our effects on the environment are starting to show.

Now I'm not an ultra-liberal left-wing naturalist who insists that we leave the environment alone and live like Tarzan as some environmentalists espouse. To some of them, our very presence (by that I mean humans) is so detrimental to the environment that we are hurting the environment by our very presence. I find this to be somewhat logical though somewhat flawed as well. I agree that humankind has done a lot to affect the environment and not all of it in a good way. Greenhouse gases and noxious emissions alone have probably affected the environment to such a degree that it would take quite a bit of doing to get the environment back on track. Now there are some like Al Gore who state that by taking simple steps we can reverse some of the problems. The difficulty in that is the fact that so many feel that it's a case of too little too late.

I don't believe that it's too late to do something, but we need people to understand that even though they may be long gone from this world or level of being by the time the world truly starts to suffer, it really will be too late. For most of us, the immediate future is our only concern; we aren't so worried about whether or not people fifty or sixty years from now would be suffering simply because most of us won't be around to ask and find out. It's the wrong attitude to take and we need to know that if not us, then the next generation is the one that is going to suffer. And we can be a positive influence. Just look at the way times change with shifting attitudes and ideas. A few decades ago the concept of a woman Vice Presidential candidate or an African-American President would have been near impossible to fathom, but times changed and so did the possibilities.

I remember reading about the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska and how photos taken of it nearly 100 years ago compared with today have shown that the glacier has receded a great distance in a very short time. It's distressing to note that in a few years it's quite possible that the Glacier will completely disappear and would only ever exist in history books. But then, why would the majority of us care? How does it affect us? For that matter, how does the breaking of the ice shelves in the Arctic affect us either? Fine. Let's look at something with a more immediate affect. The Ganges River in India, the source os so much holy devotion to many Hindus is also under threat of disappearing. Deteriorating conditions at the source of the river in the high Himalayas threatens to end the existance of the river. For millenia the river has been a source of such holiness to Hindus that if it disappears, the ramifications could be significant. Hopefully it won't come down to that situation but perhaps it will be the wake-up call the world needs to realize that we need to start affecting the environment positively.