Sunset over Mook Island, Trang.

How do you end a semester?  How do you end four years at college?  This year, Paul Hawken gave a fantastic commencement address at the University of Portland.  It was a great balance of challenge, reality and hope.  At our final seminar at ISDSI this spring we passed this out and I read two sections that seemed especially appropriate for students on study-abroad studying sustainability.

The reality:

[Y]ou are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing.

The hope:

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

We at ISDSI are privaledged to work with amazing, motivated, and creative students – who are committed to making a difference and changing the world for the better.

In Thailand, as in much of the world, more time is required to catch fewer and fewer fish.

Alanna Mitchell’s book, Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis,  lays out in clear language the multiple challenges that are facing the oceans, from oxygen depleted dead zones, to the acidification of the oceans, to the crashing of the global fish stocks. Part travel writing, part investigative reporting, Sea Sick follows Mitchell around the world talking with scientists and seeing the crisis of the oceans first-hand.

We’ve been looking for a good book that we can use on our Coastal course as well as the Islands course. Mitchell’s book is perfect for what we needed — a book with the big picture, and lots of links into the primary literature.  So, for example, while reading about her visit to Halifax and discussions with scientists studying the crisis of global fisheries, we also read the journal articles that those scientists have written (such as Worm, Boris, et. al., “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services,” Science, Vol. 314, November 2006).

Here are some excerpts (from the book’s page online).

The ocean is built to withstand change. It has layers of safeguards that the atmosphere and the land systems do not, and yet even these are being breached. It is a larger and more serious problem than atmospheric change.

However, we are not hearing much about it, or about the implications for life on the planet–not just human life and civilisation, but life in general. We hear from time to time about overfishing, or about the cities that would flood if the sea level rose, or about coral bleaching, but rarely everything put together…

About 250 million years ago, during the time known as the Great Dying at the end of the Permian period–the biggest mass extinction the world has yet known–the ocean’s oxygen ran out. There are a couple of theories about why this happened, but a leading candidate is that the surface layer warmed up enough and became salty enough to disturb the currents. Currents feed oxygen from the atmosphere into the ocean and move nutrients around. When the oxygen vanished, most life on land and in the sea–more than 90 per cent of the species then alive–died.

The point of the story, [Flannery] said, is that it is clear that the ocean contains the switch of life. Not land, nor the atmosphere. The ocean. And that switch can be flipped off.

We know it’s happened in the past, he told me. We just don’t know the trigger.

As the book makes clear, we may have pulled the trigger without realizing it.

A few good points from the book:

• The ocean produces half the oxygen we breath.  In other words, every other breath comes from the ocean.
• 99 percent of the living space on the planet is the ocean.
• Most of us have a “terrestrial bias” and really mostly think about only the very surface of the ocean (when we think about it at all).
• If all terrestrial life ceased, the life in the oceans would go on.  If life in the oceans ceased,  terrestrial life would also cease.

The book provided the basis for some great discussions.  One of the main things that kept coming up over and over again was the question of WHY.  Why do students grow up in school studying the destruction of the rainforest, and for most of the students, this was the first time they had read about the crisis facing the oceans? Their own experience proved Mitchell’s point of terrestrial bias.

Today, the students are down in Trang, Southern Thailand, camping on the beach and sea kayaking through the mangroves.  The next few days will be spent padding and diving, learning about mangroves, sea grasses and reefs. Tomorrow requires a crossing to Koh Muk, and paying attention to wind, tides and currents will be key. In just over a week, they will paddle down the coast to a small Muslim fishing village, and spend the remainder of the course learning from their host families about the crisis of the oceans Mitchell writes about, and what one small Thai community is doing to help conserve the mangrove and sea grasses, and make a difference in the future of the oceans.

This is a great book. Get it, read it, and pass it on to someone else to read.

Offshore wind turbines (via TreeHugger)

While most of the news on catastrophic climate change isn’t good, there are some signs of hope  that the massive changes to move to a post-carbon future are happening.

Via TreeHugger:

The United States Interior Department just issued regulations governing offshore renewable energy projects that use wind, ocean currents and wave power for producing electricity. The offshore leasing rules for electricity production had stalled for two years over of a turf dispute as it were between governmental agencies, but that bottleneck has been broken…

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the framework for how leases will be issued and revenue shared. Nearby coastal states will receive 27.5 percent of the royalties generated from electricity production.

Salazar anticipates that many of the proposed offshore wind projects will be in the north and central Atlantic and that the first electricity production from some of the offshore projects in two or three years, probably off the Atlantic Coast.

Wind has enourmous potential for power production, and it is ecouraging to see that it is finally getting real support from the US.  There are also economic benefits, as wind power generates a lot of jobs in both maintenance and manufacturing, and have the potential to replace coal fired plants, which have a huge negative impact on the biosphere.

None of this would be possible without the leadership of someone who finally gets it, and isn’t beholden to the fossil fuel lobby and their allies (see this article for more on how they knew the science showing anthropogenic global warming was correct but still chose to deny it). Speaking yesterday at a wind tower production facility in Iowa, President Obama said:

Now, the choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy.  The choice we face is between prosperity and decline. We can remain the world’s leading importer of oil, or we can become the world’s leading exporter of clean energy.  We can allow climate change to wreak unnatural havoc across the landscape, or we can create jobs working to prevent its worst effects. We can hand over the jobs of the 21st century to our competitors, or we can confront what countries in Europe and Asia have already recognized as both a challenge and an opportunity:  The nation that leads the world in creating new energy sources will be the nation that leads the 21st-century global economy. (via Climate Progress.)

Here in Chiang Mai there is a store selling solar panels and wind generators.  Inexpensive, efficient, and with a lot of potential.  We see solar panels in a lot of the remote villages we work with. All of it from China. It will be important for the US to lead in the post-carbon future, or there is no reason for other countries (like China) to join the effort.  And if they don’t join, then the future really is doomed.

But there is hope.  Go to Climate Progress to read a longer except of Obama’s speech, and see this post for more about what he has accomplished so far.

Today is Earth Day, a day to focus on the environment and our increasingly damaged biosphere.  Folks will be blogging about it, kids doing projects in schools, big public events, beach clean-ups, etc. That’s all good, but not enough. The news on the earth is not good, and getting worse. Singing fun songs and putting in compact fluorescent light bulbs isn’t going to do it.  We need to move to a post-carbon economy as fast as possible.

Australian bushfires. (REUTERS/Mick Tsikas)

Following climate science for several years can get depressing, as every worst case scenario turns out to not be bad enough.  The catastrophic changes are coming faster and harder than expected, bigger hurricanes, faster glacier melting, collapsing ice sheets, massive bush fires in Australia, etc. It isn’t taking 100 years to see the changes–we’re seeing them now. Meanwhile, the oil companies and their enablers have spent millions confusing the issue and introducing doubt about the anthropogenic causes of climate change, while pumping millions of years worth of carbon sequestered in the earth’s crust into the atmosphere.  They’ve been very successful at introducing false doubt, as today Treehugger reports that only 35% of US voters believe global warming is caused by human activity.

I’ve been struggling to understand why people cannot get their head around the science, or doubt that introducing gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere wouldn’t have an impact on the climate. Even with most Americans’ scientific illiteracy and the successful campaign by the oil and coal companies to confuse the issue, why do so many people not accept anthropogenic climate change?  I’m beginning to think that it may be psychological–along the lines of the stages of grief when someone finds out they have a terminal disease.  The first stage is denial.  One psychiatrist has addressed this, as well as her profession’s responsibility:

Our Moral Obligation to Act

As practitioners we help people to face reality. We chip away at their denial knowing it can be a cover for behaviors that destroy their lives. When they see the world more clearly, we urge them to take charge – warning of the dangers of being passive…

Lethal global overheating – strike the innocuous sounding “global warming” – is not something that may happen in the next century or even mid-century – it is happening now.

Scientists aren’t helping, as pointed out in this from the Guardian:

Far from over-playing their hand to swell their research coffers, scientists have been toning down their message in an attempt to avoid public despair and inaction.

Just 7% of the 261 experts surveyed (200 of whom were researchers in climate science or related fields) said they thought governments would succeed in restricting global warming to 2C. Nearly two-fifths thought this target was impossible and 46% thought a 3 to 4C rise by the end of the century was most likely.

A 3 or 4C rise might not sound much but the climatic shifts accompanying it would be massive. At 3C one to four billion extra people would face water shortages and 150 to 550 million more people would be at risk of hunger. With an extra degree of warming on top of that, seven million to 300 million would be put at risk of coastal flooding due to sea level rise.

As usual, Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a great post up I would encourage you to read, Let’s Dump “Earth Day”:

Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves

With 6.5 billion people going to 9 billion, much of the environment is unsavable. But if we warm significantly more than 2°C from pre-industrial levels — and especially if we warm more than 4°C, as would be all but inevitable if we keep on our current emissions path for much longer — then the environment and climate that made modern human civilization possible will be ruined, probably for hundreds of years (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).  And that means misery for many if not most of the next 10 to 20 billion people to walk the planet…

We have fiddled like Nero for far too long to save the whole earth or all of its species. Now we need a World War II scale effort just to cut our losses and save what matters most. So let’s call it Triage Day. And if worse comes to worst — yes, if worse comes to worst — at least future generations won’t have to change the name again.

We’re poorly adapted as a species to responding to slow moving threats with a long time horizon and no immediate impact on us.  We need to move beyond “Earth Day” and kids singing the Earth Day Rap to real changes, real movement, and a full-on effort to avert disaster.  Just ask an Aussie who got burned out in the fires last month.

If you’re interested in the science, the two best blogs are Climate Progress and Real Climate, both written by some of the top scientific experts on climate.  Dig into the links, especially the posts and links to the evidence for climate change and current revisions on how fast things are happening.

Just so this post isn’t all bad news, I’ll end on a light note with a great look at marketing Earth Day to kids:

Earth Hour 2008 in Bangkok

On Saturday night, an anticipated 1 billion households and businesses will shut off their lights for one hour. It will be the third annual Earth Hour, promoted by the WWF, one of the largest global conservation organizations. An estimated 50 million individuals took part in Earth Hour globally last year. The event is guaranteed to be even larger this year with 1,189 cities already signed up in over 80 different countries for the voluntary blackout occurring at 8 pm on March 28.

The world’s two largest countries with the fastest growing economies, China and India, are included as first time participants this year. An additional 45 developing countries and emerging economies have committed to shut off their lights this weekend, up from the 9 developing countries that were involved last year. The event provides an opportunity for country leaders to affirm their commitment to addressing global climate change as they prepare to meet later this year in Copenhagen for the UN Climate Change Conference.

Thailand was among the first countries to practice Earth Hour. During the event in previous years the country has been able to decrease its electricity usage by approximately 1,400 megawatts. This year, Thailand’s Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, will chair the event in downtown Bangkok while Thais nationwide are encouraged to participate at home.

The lasting impact of Earth Hour is yet to be determined. It has created a widely publicized forum for discussing local action taking place globally. However, will it be able to move beyond symbolic? Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and cofounder of 350.org has argued that while symbolic actions such as carpooling, changing our light bulbs, and turning out lights are good, they are hardly efficacious in addressing a global crisis. He emphasizes that rapid and massive global change requires political mobilization and the backing of strict legislation on emissions and the funding of real research on needed technologies.

Supporters of Earth Hour stress that this mobilization of a concerned global community will act as “votes” for change. However, Earth Hour Executive Director, Mr. Andy Ridley, says that Earth is not only a movement for action on global climate change. He says “Earth Hour is an opportunity for the global community to speak in one voice on the issue of climate change, while at the same time coming together in celebration of the one thing every single person on the planet has in common– the planet.”

~Stephanie Gay