Hummingbird Spotted In Aleutians; Arctic Natives Petition Climate Meeting

[hatrack]

MONTREAL - Alarmed by a rapid thaw of Arctic ice, indigenous peoples want a 189-nation conference in Canada to step up protection of their hunting cultures.

This year, a hummingbird was spotted on an Alaskan island for the first time in memory. New insect-borne parasites killed 70 reindeer in Norway and seals native to California coasts were seen in the far north Pacific.

"Climate change is threatening our way of life," indigenous peoples from Russia, Scandinavia, Greenland, Canada and Alaska said in a draft petition to the UN conference in Montreal, which is seeking ways to curb rising temperatures. "Every country has to ask if it's doing enough" to slow global warming, said Olav Mathis Eira, vice president of the Sami Council that represents reindeer herders in Scandinavia and Russia. "We're asking for action, not sympathy or money."

EDIT

Ray Johnson of the Aleut International Association, for instance, would like cash to build a barrier to slow coastal erosion in Nelson Lagoon, an Alaskan settlement of 80 people. Most winters, ice prevents waves from battering the shore but the bay did not freeze last winter for the first time in memory. "Times have changed, the climate has changed," he said. And people in Nikolski, one of the Aleutian island chain off Alaska, were stunned to see a hummingbird this year, he said.

EDIT

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/33808/story.htm

[phantom power]

1. No amount of band-aids is going to save them. Or us either.

Are we going to build a "barrier" to stop those insect-born parasites? Or the rising temperatures, or the invasion of all the southern species and loss of native foods? Or the melting permafrost?

Might as well try to re-start the atlantic currents, or build a wall against hurricanes. Our technology is a sad joke compared to the magnitude of the changes we've set in motion.

[Boomer]

2. Time for environmental triage

Agreed -- holding actions are ultimately doomed to failure and will just squander money that will be in increasingly short supply. We need to focus resources and efforts on adjusting to the new reality, not denying it.

And I'm sorry to say that goes for New Orleans and the southern Gulf Coast, too. Rebuilding in the same areas will cost a fortune, all to be washed away within the next decade, if not the next year.

Now is the time to retrench, to pull back and start a new life in a geographic area that can promise a future above water level.

[phantom power]

3. Triage seems like a good model.

I wonder if we know enough about what's happening, and what's coming, to do it. I suppose we'll just have to take our best guess and learn as we go.

I'm most worried about predicting the new locations of arable cropland. It seems like a hard thing to guess, and being able to raise food is arguably more important than anything else.

[Dogmudgeon]

4. Too late for triage

The best we can hope to do is to take as many tissue samples as possible, preserve the DNA (and sequence it all when we have the computing power), and hope we can reconstruct the organisms safely and beneficially when the climate problems stabilize in a new "mode".

The Earth is in a major die-off as we speak; it began millions of years ago, but it rapidly accelerated only in the last century. Instead of an asteroid or a comet, this time, a questionably intelligent primate is doing most of the damage.

--p!

[Boomer]

5. Politically untenable but....

The loss of decentralized locations for farming should be halted immediately. One of our highest priorities should be re-establishing small to medium-sized farms in every area of the country, instead of paving them over for yet another Wal-mart or shopping mall. This avoids undue dependence on any one area of the country (such as the western Midwest) in case of crop failure due to drought, flooding, fire, early frost, locusts, whatever. An added bonus is lowered transportation costs when we face an energy crisis.

Another immediate halt on coastal development. Existing buildings, both industrial and residential, could be grandfathered in for as long as they survive the storm surge onslaughts. But once they were wiped out, that area should be allowed to revert to wetlands.

Desert areas experiencing drought should outlaw all recreational use of water for artificial lakes, swimming pools, golf courses, decorative fountains, and non-native trees and grasses. If you don't like living in a desert, move somewhere else.

Stronger public health system to deal with the increase in new tropical diseases, with special emphasis on malaria control (better now than later).

Draconian fishing moratoriums to allow pollution-stressed and over-exploited sea life to rebound as much as possible. Ocean life is going to need all the help it can get to survive shifting climate conditions on top of all the ills we've wreacked on it.

Stronger construction codes for region-specific emergencies: basements for Midwest tornado-prone states, brush clearing for Western fire-prone states, hurricane-resistant framing.

These are just a few of the ways in which we could logically prepare for the climate onslaughts. I'm not holding my breath that any will be implemented, even in the weakest form.

No problem. People will just die instead, and we've got lots to spare.

[Dead_Parrot]

6. "Politically untenable"

It's a shame that most of the things we could do to save ourselves - cut down on transport and power use, grow locally, recycle, stop buying landfill crap (and move out of the fucking desert, you retards) simply can't happen because most people are, at the end of the day, stupid.

Or maybe ignorant, if you want to be generous.

The 10% of us who give a shit have to come up with something the other 90% will agree to - and that doesn't involve growing your own potatoes, buying organic, or - God forbid - walking, it involves big-ass TVs with a million channels, having every possible shop in one giant mall so you don't have to think, and cars bigger than houses. Personally, I'm surprised we don't have drive-thru toilets.

[Boomer]

7. It's not stupidity or even ignorance

It's worse than that: inherent inertia.

Individually, humans are creatures of habit; they learn certain patterns of behavior and then are very resistant to change. There are sound biological reasons for this because in the long run, sticking to the tried-and-true is a survival tactic and unconventional behavior incurs risk. In rare times of upheaval, individuals who adhere to the conventional ways are killed off and the outcast iconoclasts scramble for new ways to survive new conditions. Then equilibrium returns and the number of conventional individuals increases again, outnumbering the inventors.

The same pattern holds for cultural and societal institutions. They are VERY resistant to change, and the incredible effort it takes to change institutions is a further repressive force on individuals.

Institutions do not react quickly or well to rapid change of any kind, whether it be political or environmental. More often than not, they hold the center until the pressures of change shatter them entirely. Chaos ensues, new patterns of survival emerge and are, eventually, institutionalized in turn.

So while it is easy to rail against the stupidity and ignorance of people who refuse to see the looming dangers, the truth is that even when many do see the coming Apocalypse we are mired in institutions and structures that do not encourage changing deep-seated patterns of behavior. Like the Norsemen on Greenland who starved to death because their attitudes toward the native peoples blinded them to learning new ways of survival, or the horses who run back into a burning barn.

It takes a cataclysmic event to shatter the emotional, psychological and physical structures that give our society its current form. A cataclysm of that power will also result in the death of thousands or even millions of people. That's what it takes for old patterns to be dissolved. After a period of chaos, order once again asserts itself among the survivors.

Assuming there are survivors.

[Dead_Parrot]

8. Maybe...

Shopping on the internet took off fast enough, though. And America's slide from the "land of the free" into "least trusted nation" seems to have happened in a heartbeat. We can move fast enough in the wrong direction...

Maybe there there's a sort of socialogical moral entropy at work: Change for the worse is easy, change for the better take years of effort and sacrifice.

[phantom power]

9. Yes, I believe this is called "the human condition" :-)

[Dead_Parrot]

10. lol. We're screwed... nt

[Boomer]

11. Hardly comparable

>> Shopping on the internet took off fast enough <<

That's a relatively discrete behavior, and one that easily builds on a number of other trends: increased computer use, widespread use of credit cards, decreased opportunities for local shopping because of a citizenry that has become accustomed to driving to a distant supermall instead of to the shop around the corner.

Building decentralized farms, on the other hand, is fighting against the tide of a society geared toward urban/suburban development, abandonment of manual labor, and competition from large-scale agribusiness with substantial government subsidies. Add to that a consumer-frenzied culture that covets all the baubles a city offers, rather than gentler rural lifestyles.

And as for the political slide, there is nothing recent about that change. Eisenhower issued an alarm against the military/industrial complex over 50 years ago, and it was probably already entrenced back then. So some 60-70 years later, we're finally seeing what has been festering beneath the facade of a "free" democracy. In fact, this a perfect example of an entrenched institution, one that is so focused on greed and empire-building that our government can't respond to the REAL dangers facing us.

[Dead_Parrot]

12. I guess you're right.

I guess the idea of commuting to work has been around ever since the pigs stopped living in the same hut as the people. That's a lot of inertia...

[Boomer]

13. It doesn't take much time lag to create chaos

The Little Ice Age started relatively quickly, changing climate within a decade. In time, agricultural practices adjusted and people prospered once again. But even a lag of 15 or 20 years, a relative eye blink in terms of human response, meant the death of millions of people due to famine.

So how quickly can we force a change of fundamental living patterns in the US? How many people can afford to buy a hybrid car in any given year? How many can afford installing alternative energy systems?

Looking around my working class neighborhood, where most people can't afford a new car and can barely afford a used car if it costs more than a few hundred dollars, the "option" of buying green within their lifetime is unlikely.

Same for solar or other alternative forms of heating. Many people rent, and the absentee landlords don't care what their tenants are paying for utilities as long as the rent check arrives in time. Even those who own their homes are lucky if they can afford to replace a crumbling sidewalk, much less an entire new alternative energy heating system, assuming there was anyone within a hundred miles who knew how to install it. I know, because the city inspector said we were the first household in our town to even ASK about city ordinances for solar.

A community not too far from where I live just voted in a city septic system a few years ago. Many residents were still using outhouses, and the bond issue to create a city water treatment plant had been defeated several times in the recent past.

So every time I hear about what it would take to prepare this country for climate change, I remember the good citizens of Boyce, Virginia, who still think indoor toilets are controversial and I realize just how much of a hurdle we face when we ask people to change their behavior. Sigh.