by Maceo Carrillo Martinet
Daily Lobo columnist
David Suzuki, a world-renowned scientist and educator, described how society is confronting the environmental crisis: We are all in a car heading toward a brick wall at 100 miles per hour and we are fighting over who is sitting where. The only people warning us of the brick wall are those we can't hear because they're in the trunk.
I can't help but think that it was the fighting over who is sitting where that led us toward the brick wall in the first place. On the other hand, maybe the impending wall will force us to work together to go in a safer direction.
Global warming could be the facet of the environmental crisis that becomes the brick wall. The complex global warming issue boils down to how we choose to live and not live on this planet. Some of us remember the stories and songs we heard when we were young that revealed good and bad ways that humans can live. Too bad we only hear these types of stories when we are kids.
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We are beginning to witness, especially from those communities living in the polar regions of the earth, how our overuse of fossil fuels is catching up to us. There are stories of polar bears pacing back and forth along the Alaskan coastline, waiting in vain for a large ice mass to arrive - as it has for a millennium - to bring plentiful food.
NASA recently learned that the average sea level has increased by one inch in the last decade due to melting glaciers - twice as fast as the rate of the previous 50 years.
NASA also noted that glaciers in Alaska and South America are melting faster now than 10 years ago, and two to three times faster than over the last century. Researchers say that by the end of this century or sooner, the polar-regions might be ice-free during the summer months.
Some are asking whether the punch of the 2005 hurricane season is somehow connected to global warming. Recent studies of records from the 1970s indicate that the overall size, speed and duration of tropical storms around the world have nearly doubled in the last 30 years.
If you don't appreciate the strength of these hurricanes, consider that the energy generated by the swirling winds and waters of Hurricane Katrina involved 10 times more energy than what the world uses in electricity in a year. The increase in hurricane strength is believed to be a result of rising temperatures of the ocean waters.
Another recent study supporting the connection between global warming and the intensity of hurricanes concluded that the percentage of big storms - hurricanes that reach Category 4 or 5, with winds of at least 131 miles per hour - is on the rise.
In the 1970s the chance that such a hurricane was brewing anywhere across the world's oceans was around 20 percent to 25 percent. In 2004, the chance increased to between 35 percent and 41 percent. Hurricanes are not only occurring more frequently since the 1970s, but they are also lasting up to 60 percent longer.
In his call for rebuilding a bigger and better New Orleans, President Bush stated that Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature, and will not start now.
Though this gallant response slightly tickled my sense of pride, somehow I didn't feel safer. How can someone responsible for the protection of a country not care for the whims of the environment? I never knew you could relate to a Category 4 hurricane as a whim.
Bush decided not to sign the Kyoto Protocol because it would be detrimental to the U.S. economy, but the detriment of the environment is damaging to our economy and the entire planet.
In a recent anti-war rally, Harry said to truly know ourselves is to realize how we are connected to each other. I know myself enough to say I don't share President Bush's idea of how human beings should live on this earth.
But I do share this planet with him, as with everything else, and I hope we start taking a different path.
