Fire and Knowledge

Greenland has a new island, which has been named “Warming Island.” Here’s an excerpt from the news article:

The map of Greenland will have to be redrawn. A new island has appeared off its coast, suddenly separated from the mainland by the melting of Greenland’s enormous ice sheet, a development that is being seen as the most alarming sign of global warming.

Several miles long, the island was once thought to be the tip of a peninsula halfway up Greenland’s remote east coast but a glacier joining it to the mainland has melted away completely, leaving it surrounded by sea….

As the satellite pictures and the main photo which we publish today make clear, Warming Island has been created by a quite undeniable, rapid and enormous physical transformation and is likely to be seen around the world as a potent symbol of the coming effects of climate change.

But it is only one more example of the disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet, that scientists have begun to realise, only very recently, is proceeding far more rapidly than anyone thought.

Whether humans are the “main cause” or not, would it really hurt for us to stop being wasteful and polluting our beautiful home?

Yahoo! is going carbon neutral:

Yahoo! has committed to going carbon neutral this year. Essentially, that means we’re going to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects around the world to neutralize Yahoo!’s impact on the environment. While doing our homework on this, we measured our carbon footprint and discovered that Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year….

We know carbon neutrality isn’t without controversy. And it’s honestly deserved if companies and individuals don’t first make an effort to find direct ways to reduce their impact. We’ll continue to be vigilant about cutting ours, looking for creative ways to power our facilities, encourage even more employees to seek alternative commutes, and generally inspire Yahoos around the world to think differently about their energy use. (For example, in honor of Earth Day, we’re challenging Yahoos to decrease their consumption by 20% this week to help build lasting habits.) We’ll also be deliberate about investing in offset projects that can verifiably deliver their expected environmental benefits.

I think it’s great that more companies are getting on the “green” bandwagon. I hope it continues. I wonder when Christian organizations will start doing things like this. It will probably be a long while, unfortunately.

It’s taken a long time for awareness to get this far and to have so many people embrace it — though there are still many critics. (And I’m thankful for critics, as long as they are really trying to figure out what is right instead of just being stubborn and not wanting to change their ways.)

It is my hope that caring for our world will become a standard value of humanity. There is a chance!

People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 41

Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers.

–Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), 417

Here is an interesting video of Wendell Berry interviewing Bill McKibben about his latest book Deep Economy, global warming, energy, economics, agriculture, ethanol, local solutions, and more.

At last the owner men came to the point. The tenant system won’t work anymore. One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families. Pay him a wage and take all the crop.

We have to do it. We don’t like to do it….

But you’ll kill the land with cotton.

We know. We’ve got to take cotton quick before the land dies. Then we’ll sell the land. Lots of families in the East would like to own a piece of land.

The tenant men looked up alarmed. But what’ll happen to us? How’ll we eat?

You’ll have to get off the land. The plows’ll go through the dooryard.

–John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), 33

To trust “progress” or our putative “genius” to solve all the problems that we cause is worse than bad science; it is bad religion.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 11

[Thoreau] would see that today ten thousand engineers are busy making sure that the world shall be convenient even if it is destroyed in the process, and others are determined to increase its usefulness even though its beauty is lost somewhere along the way.

–E. B. White, “A Slight Sound at Evening” (1954) in Essays of E.B. White (1977), 241