We signed up for Blog Action Day where we, along with almost 6,000 other blogs post on a single topic in an attempt to bring greater awareness to that topic. This year’s topic is Global Climate Change which is appropriate because I have been spending some time thinking about how I think about the warming the planet is experiencing.
There has been a series of articles that have come my way that have prompted some reflection on my perspective and my ideas about why we should take this topic seriously. The articles combined with recent reflection on how healthy it is to regularly evaluate what you are doing and why has brought about another time of evaluation on our time here in South Korea and what we will do when we return to the Northwest.
Every morning I start my day with a browse over the New York Times online. Two articles, on two consecutive days, drove home an obvious, but not commonly spoken about point. When this point was the subject of a third article I read elsewhere it was a clear issue that I had lost track of why Global Warming is a frightening issue.
Global warming is effecting the US through the glaciers on it’s mountains, the slow change in weather and farming patterns and animal migrations. These realities will grow more apparent with time but they are, however, not things that will alter our lives in the way that the aforementioned articles claim Global Warming will effect others. The people who will face the greatest changes are those in poorer countries closer to the equator – especially coastal countries.
South East Asia has tremendous shoreline and very low lying deltas and coastal areas. If the sea level rose just a few feet the effects would displace millions of people and cut off food production for many millions more. In a report paraphrased by the New York Times, Vietnam’s government projected “that more than one-third of the [Me-Kong river's] delta, where 17 million people live and nearly half the country’s rice is grown, could be submerged if sea levels rise by three feet in the decades to come.” On top of permanent flooding the report also said that “greater total rainfall, wetter wet seasons and drier dry seasons” are to be expected. In a country where too much rain means flooding and too little mean no food the effects would be horrendous.
No nation, however large or small, wealthy or poor, can escape the impact of climate change. Rising sea levels threaten every coastline. More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent. More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive. On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees. The security and stability of each nation and all peoples — our prosperity, our health, our safety — are in jeopardy. And the time we have to reverse this tide is running out.
- President Obama to the UN General Assembly
Many times I see Global Warming as a much simpler issue. An issue that can be fixed with economic clarity regarding the true market price of goods, or through a reduction in consumptive lifestyles. These solutions will help the greater problem, but if I only see these solutions when I think of something as potentially abstract as Global Warming, then I believe that I am missing the point. The issue is much more of a reality for those who already have food shortages and issues with housing and basic sanitation because for those people life is going to get immeasurably more difficult in the decades to come. It is the people that I cut out of my pictures when I reduce Global Warming into terms of cause and effect or problem and solution. This is not a math problem, it is a humanitarian problem.
There are many articles that have been written about this topic, but to see it as an issue of moral responsibility to those who are poor and without the means to change much, if any, of the situation is far less common and much more challenging. It is less likely for news sources to tell us to get our hands dirty with the moral challenges of talking about people and how best to care for them. I found an article that did challenge me to do just that. The author believes, and I strongly agree, that is is the responsibility of every person to “speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.” He challenged his readers to look at Global Warming as something that directly effects the health and well-being of other humans in a very real way and because of that we should approach it as a humanitarian issue that we have direct influence in.
If the Maldives, “an Indian Ocean island state threatened with extinction if global warming causes seas to rise,” can “commit to being carbon neutral by 2020″ then I feel like it is our responsibility to love our neighbors as our selves and to respond in a significant way.
-Kelly
