the death march of the penguins
Posted by admin on 05 Aug 2008 at 08:47 am | Tagged as: climate chaos, devastation
Julia Whitty writes on Alternet about the disappearing sea ice of Antarctica, and the impact this is having on penguins.
Hiking back into radio range, we hear from Ron Naveen, counting southern giant petrel nests on the other side of the island. It’s terrible here, he reports, just awful. At first I picture him befouled by stomach-oil spit from the bellies of the huge albatrosslike birds the whalers called stinkers. But his concern is that he’s found only 75 nests in a colony that once housed more than 600. Worse, it appears all the petrels are sitting on eggs, far too late in the season for the chicks to survive. The whole island is a bust.
Breeding success in Antarctica is highly variable. Local events — rain, heat, snowfall — can crash an entire season. In East Antarctica, southern giant petrels have been found dead on their nests, a single egg nestled in the brood patch, the birds having succumbed to enormous, burying snows. Yet what’s happening now is indicative of a larger meteorological reality. The western Antarctic Peninsula is warming faster than any place on Earth. Wintertime temperatures have risen a staggering 9 degrees Fahrenheit in 50 years. What was once a cold, dry place has become a warm, wet place. The wildlife is reeling from the chaos, some finding opportunity, others catastrophe. On Penguin Island, Adélie populations have plummeted 75 percent since 1980.
This website graphically shows the disappearing ice in both northern and southern hemispheres, including movies and 30 year comparisons.
While the media concerns itself with the economic impact of peak oil and the so-called ‘credit crunch’, the ecological impact of (in particular) 100 years of cheap fuel, and (in general) 10,000 years of empire or so-called civilisation, barely gets a mention. The planet is warming, and the weather is destabilising, and still the majority are ignorant of the impact their lifestyles are having. Forests are still being cut, seas stripmined, the planet is being raped and pillaged, and people are worried about the ‘value’ of their house, or how they can continue to get to work with the rising price of petrol.
Sometimes it seems that things just keep on getting worse – is there any point to continue posting here? Is anyone really listening? Or thinking about how their lives impact upon nature? Or working towards a local, equitable, harmonious world? Sometimes growing our own food, and finding contentedness in one place we call home doesnt feel like enough. The impulse (human nature or conditioning?) is to try to do something BIG, but we know that big ideas, big projects, ego and empire, are some of the causes that got us all into this mess. No one can ‘save the world’, but we can all reduce our involvement in killing the world.
We’d love to hear from more of you, some of your stories about your actions to escape the empire, some of your reports about what works for you on your land base. Perhaps we could grant user accounts to a few people with different perspectives, and different areas? Interested? Let us know.
Human activities under the yoke of civilisation is messing up our life support systems, and we’d really like to report some inspirational stuff.
Well I’ve certainly been listening! I’ve been visiting this site for quite a few months now, and have found some really interesting posts. Keep up the good work!
I haven’t got much of a landbase at the moment being based at both my family home and at university, but I have a fair few veg containers going, and have 2 seasons worth of fruit foraging and making chutneys and jellies. To get over the issue of land, I’m working on project within the student community modelled on “GROFUN” in Bristol, in which a group come together and visit each others gardens regularly in turn to give the whole place a permaculture makeover in a short term otherwise impossible on one’s own. I’m also involved in getting the city on the road to be a Transition City. As you say, its best to act local with fairly small actions.
In my view humans tend to work best in tribal style units, so in order to survive the common troubles ahead it will be necessary to form ‘urban tribes’ based on growing food ad mutual aid. Trying to get people to do this without scaring the shit out of them or making them hostile is a challenge however!
The multiple user accounts suggestion sounds quite interesting, as it could bring some diversity and remove some of the pressure off you to come up with all the material. I could give it a shot perhaps – but no promises on quality or regularity of posting!
fantastic, it really helps to get some positive feedback, and although many posts are just links to other website content, of a related nature, we’d very much appreciate others’ contributions.
no pressure, i’ll sign you up as a user, and feel free to post whatever relevant content…. whenever, or not, whatever you can, want, or like… if we dont agree with something you say, we can always debate with you, or at worst use our admin rights to delete
we also agree that humans work best in tribes. the elites of civilisation have done the damnedest to break up communities over the world, but many are still intact, and many people are seeking intentional communities nowadays…
everything we write here is a fine line between informing people and scaring the shit out of people, or provoking hostile defensive reactions. humans dont like change, but unfortunately for those who find it difficult to embrace, change is what we need…. voluntary change would be a lot less painful than forced by economics or climate change etc… those of us who accept things now, and start connecting to our pseudo-tribes, will be far better placed to weather the storm that is no longer on the horizon for many, but directly overhead, with much worse to come….
welcome onboard, we’ll sign you up and email you details now.