Climate change is a hard topic for me to discuss; I believe in global warming and I believe it is human caused. I look around and I see things that negatively impact the earth, and the beings that live on it. I grew up in this culture and I am aware that I contribute to what I witness. Whenever I discuss the topic of climate change, I cannot help but feel like a hypocrite. But, those feelings aside, I hope to learn more, because then I can make better decisions and properly defend, and protect, the earth.
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One person to help put into perspective what we as humans are doing to the planet, is James Balog. His book Extreme Ice Now, is probably one of the first things that has given me hope for the future, but is eye opening:
paradoxical as it seems, hydrocarbon energy sources – oil, coal, and natural gas – are not ordinary fungible commodities like, say, corn kernels or pork bellies. They are a distillation of life and time in a way nothing else is. Long ago, in the dust of ancient epochs, an infinity of animals and plants were born, grew to whatever maturity was their destiny, fed, inhaled, exhaled, lived in communities, and propagated their young. Their existence – all of it based on photosynthesis – concentrated the blazing light of a trillion sunrises into their bodies, just as our own animate life does today.
The essence of those past lives and vanished sunrises is now being passed to us, transmuted into the clear liquid drizzling into our gas tanks or the flickering of a light bulb, or a picture dancing across a television screen or hundreds of other daily events we never notice. We gobble up the heat and electrons in nanoseconds, and then they are gone. It is a process both wondrous and awful. Remembering the miracle of this transformation might inject some much-needed grace and humility into the engine of our consumption. (Balog 112)
The life of the past, the energy, it exists in what we are using to destroy the planet today.
Work Cited
Balog, James. Extreme Ice Now. Washington D.C: National Geographic, 2009. Print