http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18616By Bill McKibben
excerpt:
. . . Bush, a few weeks after taking office, explaining why he's opting out of the Kyoto protocols, the only official international attempt to deal with global warming:
I will explain as clearly as I can, today and every other chance I get, that we will not do anything that harms our economy.... That's my priority. I'm worried about the economy.It's not as if Bush is alone in this thought. And it does seem to epitomize the danger that the satisfactions of consumer life and business success have become almost sacred while the physical world now turning to chaos before our eyes is taken for granted, and not seen as the reality that must be faced.<2>
It's to this question of reality that Gretel Ehrlich turns her formidable talent in The Future of Ice, recently published in paperback.<3> Like Thompson, she is fascinated by ice—her "journey into the cold" takes her from Greenland to Argentina—and she provides what may be a kind of obituary for the planet's ice regions, and their special forms of life, written while they still exist. It is, she says, a "cry for help—not for me, but for the tern, the ice cap, the polar bear, and the lenga forest; for the river of weather and the ways it chooses to be born."<4>
It is hard not to approach this year's oncoming winter in an elegiac mood, with the testimony of Thompson's ice cores and the Arctic sea ice data and Ehrlich's account making the season's natural and lovely darkness seem suddenly somber. We are forced to face the fact that a century's carelessness is now melting away the world's storehouses of ice, a melting whose momentum may be nearing the irreversible. It's as if we were stripping the spectrum of a color, or eradicating one note from every octave. There are almost no words for such a change: it's no wonder that scientists have to struggle to get across the enormity of what is happening.
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