Environment Breaking News

2009-11-08T10:05:00.000-08:00

The slow apocalypse
Charles Foran

Planet abuse. Everyone is talking about it these days. Melting ice caps and climbing sea levels, polar bears losing weight and fish fleeing the rising heat of Texas: Conversation about climate change tends to resemble campfire competitions to tell the scariest story. Many such tales will be told at the international climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen next month. Expect gloom from the experts.

Doom will likely figure into the prognostications as well. The hour for any kind of repair job, we're being warned, is getting late. Former vice-presidents are saying as much. So are Nobel laureates. In 2007, Oprah Winfrey selected a new Cormac McCarthy novel for her book club that begins with time, in effect, already expired.

The America of The Road is dead, the poisoned land still smouldering. Survivors dine on tinned goods, or on each other, and can only dream of vanished brook trout, their backs showing “vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming.” Now the novel is a movie starring Viggo Mortensen, its release later in November a few weeks too tardy to retail Halloween frights.

Welcome to the slow apocalypse. The world un-becoming not with a bang but the whimper of ash rain and contaminated soil, less and less food to eat or clean water to drink. Mr. McCarthy's The Road is part of an imaginative project that is both an extension of post-Second World War nuclear anxieties, and worries unique to this millennium.

That project is the dramatizing of incremental, rather than catastrophic, change to our circumstances on Earth, a process many of us still find difficult to conceptualize. But conceptualizing is what artists do, generally in the most vivid terms possible.

First, some background. As long as there have been novels, there have been ones set in an imagined future. Dystopias from Gulliver's Travels to 1984 addressed, it was commonly understood, the ills of their own society and age, thin or thickly disguised. Orwell probably settled on the title for his book by simply reversing the final two digits of the year it was completed: 1948.

But once the A-bomb posed the dilemma of humans wielding power beyond our moral and, perhaps, developmental qualifications, the focus of dystopian writing and, more recently, filmmaking, expanded. The novels On the Beach and Riddley Walker, the movies Dr. Strangelove and the Mad Max trilogy emerged from the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were not only satires of their present-day venality; they were also staring ahead into the abyss and thinking ahead to the unthinkable.

With the scale of human-made disasters expanded from local Armageddons to planetary ones, the lid came off what needed to be envisioned, and why. Parallel or complimentary end-game scenarios came naturally to probing minds. Science fiction in particular proved deft at outlining an array. Viruses were especially popular, as were computers with big ideas. For some reason, zombies continue to pop up.

The detonated nuclear weapon or unleashed virus often resulted from error or wild caprice. In Dr. Strangelove, a nutty general launches a nuclear air-strike on the Soviet Union. In I Am Legend, book and movies alike, researchers develop a cancer vaccine that goes awry. Critiques of modern society underpinned the madness – in the Kubrick film, the military-industrial complex is rife with warped sexuality and a death wish – but a crazy person still had to push the button or a robot had to get uppity before the unthinkable occurred.

Yes, the late 20th century was admitting, we are overreaching, building things we don't understand and can't be trusted to use properly. Yes, it is unsettling. But rightly or wrongly, human agency still felt in play in the era of nuclear apprehension. Neutralize the crazies and pull the plug on Hal. Ensure that cooler heads prevail.

EXTENDED NIGHTMARES

That feeling may now be gone. Or else it has been supplanted by newer, still darker portents. In The Road, the ravaged landscape the father and son must negotiate is, in fact, the aftermath of nuclear war some years before. But Mr. McCarthy is so intent in conveying this broken world, and does so with such acuity, that the novel – or, at least, the zeitgeist's embrace of it – is tapping into 21st-century anxieties about how we are breaking our planet.

What we have done to the environment over the past several decades isn't only a lunacy comparable to stockpiling nuclear weapons. It also appears ever more beyond our fumbling agency. A bomb (or 27,000 active warheads, to be exact) you can conceivably – conceivably – deactivate; a murdered Earth you can't resuscitate – or maybe not in time.

The shelf of books meditating on our emerging crisis is already distinguished. Available for readers who wish their nightmares extended into the daylight realm are David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004), with its six stories spaced over several centuries and nested into each other, and the water-logged Britain depicted in Ronald Wright's pioneering A Scientific Romance (1997). Then there is Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods, a novel published in 2008 but set over a span of 64 million years. It takes the speculative in speculative fiction very seriously.

This fall, three new Canadian novels further outline the worry. Jean McNeil's The Ice Lovers takes place in the aftermath of a 2013 global flu pandemic and in a steadily disintegrating Antarctic. Douglas Coupland's Generation A envisions a near future where the damage done to nature has rendered bees extinct, and most humans are addicted to a drug called Solon.

By far the sternest visions, though, are contained in Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood. It is a loose sequel to her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, another foundational work of the age of environmental anxiety. Like its predecessor, the novel is set in a future where planet abuse has triggered the collapse of nation-states. In their stead are giant corporations with ferocious security militias to keep the “pleebrats,” as she calls the less fortunate, in slums.

All the more fearsome for the precision of Ms. Atwood's speculations on the outcomes of our preoccupations with everything from reality TV to genetically modified foods and animals, The Year of the Flood foresees a bad end to our Earth – or, at least, to our thriving on it. She is far from alone in predicting this outcome. “It's re-evolving,” a character in The Stone Gods declares in the wake of a world war induced by melting ice caps, toxic levels of carbon dioxide and religious fanaticism. “It's Life after Humans, whatever that is, but you know what? It can't be so much worse, can it?” The answer, for Ms. Winterson, is a categorical “no.”

Is the end actually so nigh? While the reality of climate change is beyond dispute, the singularity of it, along with the reversibility of its effects, remains subject for debate. As responses to the crisis, too, even the most exacting of these novels are closer to expressions of foreboding than real argument.

(For argument, plenty of non-fiction books will oblige. Prominent among them are Jared Diamond's Collapse and Mr. Wright's more recent A Short History of Progress. The title of another fall 2009 Canadian release, Gwynne Dyer's Climate Wars, summarizes its prophecy.) But that is the mood of many at present. Good artists may get their forecasts wrong, but rarely mistake the larger emotional weather. Often, they are predicting what we fear, consciously or otherwise, will fill in the skies in the days to come. Specifics vary – Mr. McCarthy and Ms. Mitchell source the implosion to nuclear war, Ms. Atwood to environmental degradation, Ms. Winterson to a combination – but tones and time-frames are largely consistent. Here, these millennium voices are foretelling, lies our fairly near future, steadily, irrevocably unfolding.

AN ANIMAL LOGIC

Two qualities of the slow apocalypse compel these jeremiads. Again, the absence of specific human agency to climate change is vexing; we can't quite locate the right people to blame, and so halt their nefarious activities. Lacking an easy villain to arrest, the unravelling may be especially hard to arrest.

As well, we know ourselves as a species. Humans are rarely content until we have exhausted a resource, never mind how fragile or finite. The Canadian government will be bringing a proposal to Copenhagen. Its target for greenhouse-gas reductions, the so-called “20 per cent by 2020,” won't be adequate. Nor are most observers expecting it to honour that target, or even try.

There may be, in other words, an animal logic to our flirting with ruining the planet. It's how we are designed: aggressive and cocky, disinclined to moderate our appetites or take responsibility for our actions. We get this self-destructive tendency lurking, if not necessarily dominating, our nature. It is a problem, and always has been. With nuclear and now environmental scenarios, the problem is suddenly of a scale, and consequence, without precedent. These chilling fictions are born of that cold fact.

Charles Foran's most recent book is the essay collection Join the Revolution, Comrade.
Source: Globe and Mail
________________________________________________________
The Environment Breaking News Blog is Supporting Artists Creating ArtWorks on Environment Themes...

Amazing Artworks (with Creator Name ) can be viewed below...

For Larger Views or to Support Artists, Click on ArtWork Image !

2009-11-07T20:13:00.000-08:00

Wildlife officials:
37 pythons killed in pilot Florida hunt

Associated Press
WEST PALM BEACH -- A pilot program aimed at helping eradicate giant, nonnative Burmese pythons from South Florida has ended with 37 of the invasive constrictors being killed, wildlife officials said Tuesday.

Wildlife officials began issuing permits to snake experts in July in the first-ever state-sanctioned python hunt. Those permits, 15 in all, expired Oct. 31.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission hopes to restart the program next year with up to 50 permits being issued to experts. The commission says it's pleased with the data collected so far.

``This was more about finding where they are and seeing if we can contain their expansion,'' Scott Hardin, FWC exotic species coordinator, said Tuesday.

Meanwhile, licensed hunters in the state can continue to kill the pythons in designated areas, including portions of the Everglades around Big Cypress National Preserve.

``If you're in there hunting, and you see a python, you can kill it,'' Hardin said.

He said roughly half the snakes killed during this initial permitted hunt were juveniles, confirming to experts that the snakes are reproducing in the wild. Information on locations where the snakes were killed also indicates they are possibly expanding their populations across South Florida.

The number of pythons in the region has exploded in the past decade to potentially tens of thousands, though no one can say for sure how many are out there.

Scientists believe pet owners freed their snakes into the wild once they became too big to keep. They also think some Burmese pythons may have escaped in 1992 from pet shops battered by Hurricane Andrew and have been reproducing ever since.

Officials say the constrictors can produce up to 100 eggs at a time. As they feed on birds, small rodents and other native species, the snakes are disrupting the ecosystem's natural balance.

A bill is currently working its way through Congress aimed at banning the trade and import of pythons and other invasive snakes into the United States.

Source: MiamiHerald
________________________________________________
The Environment Breaking News Blog is Supporting Artists Creating ArtWorks on Environment Themes...

Amazing Artworks (with Creator Name ) can be viewed below...

For Larger Views or to Support Artists, Click on ArtWork Image !
>
>

2009-11-07T17:47:00.000-08:00

Arctic Ice May Disappear in a Decade

A new report on global warming predicts the frozen Arctic Ocean will soon be like a normal sea in the summers. There are shocking changes happening in the polar environment and its fragile eco-systems. For millions of years, the sea around the North Pole has been frozen all year round.

Recent research from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Catlin Atlantic Survey show things are changing fast. They predict that within a decade, the Arctic will be largely ice-free in the summer. They base their prediction on the rate at which the sea ice is currently thinning.

The lead researcher, Professor Peter Wadhams, said: "The area is now more likely to become open water each summer, bringing forward the potential date when the summer sea ice will be completely gone."

An ice-free Arctic will have consequences for the whole world’s weather patterns. The Arctic sea ice is a key part of the Earth’s climate system. Experts call it Earth's “refrigerator”. They said that as it disappears, the world will become a lot warmer.

Scientists are still unclear exactly what changes there will be to our weather. Forecasters predict an increase in all kinds of disasters and extreme weather events. These include massive flooding, much more dangerous hurricanes and the spread of the world’s deserts.

These new findings provide an urgent call for world leaders to act. The timing of the WWF report is a reminder to those attending the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in December. Rich countries will face pressure to agree to reduce their carbon emissions by 40 per cent by 2020

Breaking News English

http://www.BreakingNewsEnglish.com

--------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------

________________________________________________

The Environment Breaking News Blog is Supporting Artists Creating ArtWorks on Environment Themes...

Amazing Artworks (with Creator Name ) can be viewed below...

For Larger Views or to Support Artists, Click on ArtWork Image !

-----

---------

2009-11-07T07:03:00.000-08:00

Will Climate Change Ruin Your Vacation?

Climate change could alter your travel plans in the not too distant future -- including the face of world tourism destinations, how visitors get there, and who gets to go. A new report by the British tourism industry and a sustainability think tank, Forum for the Future, warns the impact of climate change could degrade now-popular vacation hot spots.

Among the scenarios imagined is a type of "doomsday" see-it-while-you can rush to visit natural resources before they disappear; the high cost of a "green" travel and climate-related political instability in some destination countries may also threaten the industry.

Another study on the issue is just kicking off at Michigan State University, where a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation will be used to examine climate-change impacts on global industries such as tourism.

Yet destinations around the United States and the world may already be feeling the effects.

In Hawaii, warming oceans threaten both coral reefs and a $360 million tourism industry, according to an editorial in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

Off the Oregon coast, home to legendary beaches, researchers have been tracking an oxygen-starved dead zone in the Pacific Ocean the size of the state of New Jersey.

The dead zone may be expanding, permanent, and caused by a climatic forces rather than pollution, a National Science Foundation study found.

Three national parks in subtropical Florida, including the Everglades, are at risk of becoming the first U.S. national parks lost entirely to rising seas, according to a study by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Across the globe, Mount Everest, the holy grail of mountaineering, has horse flies buzzing through its 17,585-foot base camp, and sherpas fearful of glacier-fed lakes bursting their banks and wiping out climbing trails, The Guardian reported.

The Maldives, a chain of low coral atolls in the Indian Ocean, plans on holding a government cabinet meeting under water, equipped with scuba gear and by whiteboards, to call attention to rising sea levels that threaten tourism, fishing and human habitation.

In Zimbabwe, droughts, flooding and disease may threaten wildlife, landscapes and tourism around the Zambezi River, including the world-renowned Victoria Falls, according to a report by a regional research organization.

However, the United Nations blamed "uncontrolled development," unfettered competition with Zambia for tourists, and poor government stewardship for ecological degradation around the falls.
Ronnie Lovler/Newsdesk.org
____________________________________________
The Environment Breaking News Blog is Supporting Artists Creating ArtWorks on Environment Themes...

Amazing Artworks (with Creator Name ) can be viewed below...

For Larger Views or to Support Artists, Click on ArtWork Image !
----
------