Inland, Dreaming of Waves

Cautionary tales for rich white people

OK, catching up on the blog here.

I went to see Bill McKibben, who wrote The End of Nature and just published Deep Economy, speak in Boulder tonight. His audience was old white people from Boulder, not one of whom I recognized. That shocked me. I thought at least one person from Wildlands Restoration Volunteers would be there, or maybe the Nature Conservancy, but no. I felt almost young in this audience.

McKibben was the first to write about global warming (in The End of Nature) for laypeople. He says that in all the years he’s been studying the issue, he noticed that scientists have become increasingly panicked. Regular people are beginning to take notice, but they’re not panicked yet. I wonder what it will take?

At the end, I got up and asked him if anybody had been exploring options for keeping the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets from melting. He answered me as if I were crazy. But after he said that the Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to raise ocean levels several meters, should it melt, I thought it was an eminently practical question. Why NOT try to keep the Arctic ice from melting?

After all, the global warming we’re seeing now was caused by events decades ago. It’s going to take us decades to get emissions to zero. So we’re going to be warming the globe for a good many years. I think we should do something now to preserve the glaciers and ice sheets we have left.

posted by Price of Silence @ 7:18 PM