If you find yourself happy now and
indulging yourself in the finer things that life has to offer, don’t you think
your children would expect the same thing? Could you imagine a world with dark
smog filled skies and rising temperatures in heat? Without being able to drive
your SUV due to the oxygen level of our atmosphere containing too much carbon
and having a breaking point for the clean air we need to survive. Animals
dying, food and clean water are diminished, and world populations are
continually fading from 6…5…4…3…and finally down to only 1 billion people left
on our once healthy planet.
This is what our future holds. This
is what our children and children’s children are going to have to deal with
because of our over indulgence and our greed for more…and more…and still more.
Drive your SUV’s and trucks; continue wasting food and wasting valuable
resources. Continue wasting the only sources that we have been able to use as a
source of prosperity and growth only to have it shoved back in our faces in a
less valuable and a less manipulative state of matter.
This is how strongly I feel about
this topic after seeing a documentary called Chasing Ice. This documentary
opened my eyes to what our actions are really doing to our vast and beautiful
world. James Balog, the creator of this documentary, explained his desire for
science but his hatred for statistics. So he decided to make a spectacle out of
scientific information through photography. Balog captured the beauty and
horror of humans’ interaction with nature and how it is changing because of our
presence and our growing impact.
James was looking for a new way to
explore the topic of climate change because of how difficult it was to grasp
the idea that our world was rising in temperature. He came to the conclusion
that ice was the only solid way to explain the change in our climate. He
decided to observe the glaciers in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, and in Glacier
Park, Montana.
Using Balogs’ background in photography,
he decided to obtain the physical aspect of the change through pictures and the
idea of creating a visual aid for people to see these changes over a 3-year
period. A team of experts in Glaciers from the University of Colorado, a team
of engineers in the field of creating camera systems that could withstand the
forces of nature, and Balog ventured out on this expedition that they referred
to as The EIS or The Extreme Ice Survey. The EIS developed a camera system that
would take pictures of the glaciers every 5 minutes in the day as long as it
was daylight. This occurred every day for 3-4 years.
Balog hoped that this physical and
visual evidence would show some type of change. He knew how statistical evidence
had been shoved down the worlds’ throat for years and how it had never made
much difference in how the world reacted. After 3-4 years and hundreds of
thousands of pictures from 30 different cameras spread throughout the world,
Balog had his visual evidence and the change was catastrophic.
In his study, he discovered that
the minimum recession of most of the glaciers he photographed was 1 mile and
had a range of up to 2.5 miles. A glacier is supposed to grow and recede, but most
of these glaciers were unhealthy and shrinking, FAST. Balog revealed that
because the glaciers were melting this fast, the ocean would rise 1-3 feet in
his daughter’s lifetimes, minimum. And his daughters are only 21 and 23 years
of age. These changes are affecting the disastrous outcomes of tropical storms
and giving them the opportunity to reach further onto the mainland.
The EIS team watched the calving
process of the glaciers, which is when these glaciers have chunks as big as the
South point of Manhattan break off into the ocean forming icebergs, (this is
not normal for glaciers). The Fact is that our climate is changing and it will
affect our children’s well-being. We need to make a stand and figure out a way
to divert our tendencies of increasing the carbon in the oxygen from an average
of 220 parts per million over the past 800,000 years to an increasing 500 parts
per million in the last 10 years.
For more information on this topic,
you can visit the site that follows. Also, view the trailer seen at the home
page.
