Global melt down
The poles are melting. As northern permafrost escapes it adds more greenhouse gases that are far more potent than CO2.
The glaciers all around the world are melting.
Greenland is sits atop slushing rivers that add to the melt at an increasing, accelerating flow of great concern.
Large segments of the Antarctic Ice sheet calving add to unimaginable volumes of water.
Indeed, some studies indicate that in just a few decades almost 60 meters of sea rise will inundate all low lying and coastal cities.
Ocean water that brings salt will also flood out and contaminate fresh water along with crops and habitats.
Groundwater tables are sinking. This means less water for all food production in places where droughts and famine are already driving migration of plants, animals, and people.
Such tipping points are already tipping, yet, if you watch human behavior, water is used for pursuits as frivolous as greening lawns and filling plastic bottles. Then, the plastic containers themselves add to the flood of pollution and contamination.
Melting hard hearts is the answer
The solution is easy. Stop waste and selfish behavior. Yet, people are notoriously given to twin evils of separate tribal belonging and convenience expectation.
When “everybody else is doing it” it’s almost impossible to even see that we are the culprits driving climate crisis. We are embedded in a structural system of fossil fuels that creates a false sense of being independent.
The most common scapegoat is “Them”, as in “them versus us”. Immigrants have borne the brunt of this blame recently. But a new “them” is also on the horizon. Corporate multinationals, the elites that formerly benefited from exploitation of planet and people, are beginning to be seen as taking advantage simply by controlling more than their fair share.
The very soggy movie from 2019, Parasite, held a mirror up to inequity and inequality, reflecting a more recent trend of looking at the ultra wealthy as parasites. Everything from internet access upon a basement toilet to sewage floods that do happen in South Korea, (and elsewhere) in that movie tie into the way people live today.
Widespread understanding of our belonging to a sustaining planet is key. And there does seem to be a sea change in our public perception recently.
When people learn they have both personal power and more importantly, group power, they unite and can create change. The tragedy in Parasite does not have to be a collective human tragedy for all, because such art teaches us that we can alter our choices.
Hope is still possible. As more and more people feel the effects of food shortage, water conflicts, and the diseases they bring, more and more people are accepting, at least, that we have some individual, group, and government power when we work together.
And our ability to adapt as the most adaptable species, is well known.
Water, water everywhere may be in many of our lives from now on, but innovation, invention, imagination, cooperation, a sense of caring and belonging to Earth matter greatly. Most indigenous cultures from which we all evolved have known this for thousands of years. Most of all, compassion and meaning changes people in each new generation.
We are probably the least likely species to go extinct, but we do have to begin to care about water all around us. In whatever form water comes in, we have to see it as what we are made of, and of what our planet consists of for life to happen at all.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: ERIC ZHU on Unsplash
