Relearning lessons of global change

Greetings from Europe, that part of the world where the families of at least 96 out of every 100 of you originated.

Regardless of the demonizing President Bush attempted again this week of folks who came to the United States looking for better lives, virtually all Americans are “from away.”

Don’t think I wasn’t mightily tempted to trace the Bush bloodline back to his “native roots” and prove that his antecedents scrambled here from elsewhere – but something important has happened in Brussels and I’ll have to save that review of his obvious hypocrisy for another time.

You might have heard that on Friday the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its latest report. It’s an “assessment of current scientific understanding of impacts of climate change on natural, managed and human systems” and “the capacity for these systems to adapt.”

Enough smart guy talk, what they said in the study was: The outlook is bleak.

On our planet that we’ve inhabited all these millennia, we’ve got enlarged glacial lakes (valuable ice, now huge dangerous puddles), ground instability (everything from melting permafrost and avalanches to tsunamis) changes in species at the poles (tiny microbes through predatory mammals dying). Heck, there’s really nothing that hasn’t been negatively affected since 1970 (that’s when scientists started warning that we were on the wrong track).

The report went on to state that trees are budding at the wrong times, birds hatching and flying at the wrong time, heck, even the Canadians had a nonstarter for clubbing-baby-seal season this week because the baby seals can’t climb up to the ice drifts anymore.

Of course the report, written more formally, reads just as scary: “The resilience of many ecosystems is likely to be exceeded this century.”

Meaning: eventually, stuff in nature won’t bounce back and that includes us.

We’re on our way to water contamination and shortages of drinking water. We’re in for wide-ranging food-borne diseases, respiratory and skin diseases and malnutrition epidemics among the poor people of the world – like Katrina victims, regardless of their nation’s wealth.

Sadly, we have faced this all before but shortsightedly when our ancestors traveled across the Atlantic we stopped studying their history.

In 1315, when our immigrating family members still lived in Europe, they endured a colossal famine. The depravation so devastated the masses that historians believe that the population of Western Europe was cut in half. In half!

That cataclysm, ironically similar to today because storms, disease, and war exacerbated the problem, could have been avoided. What’s even worse: Then, like today, scholars predicted the disaster in time to avoid it.

To add ironic insult to injury, they had the technology to save millions of lives but their political and social leaders ignored the warnings.

Maybe we have found Bush’s ancestors after all.

But why do our leaders to do nothing?

We have a dangerous “Star Trek” mentality at work in the United States. In our bleakest hour some heroic figure will pull us from the brink of disaster in the nick of time.

It’s either that or folks truly believe that some 97 percent of our scientists have fabricated the whole thing.

Either way, what’s the harm in copying what the Europeans that stayed in Europe are doing?

Those Europeans have heeded the warnings of the global warming specialists, thereby amending their carbon-producing ways. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Germany, a country smaller than Montana, produces more than twice the wind power of the entire United States. And they’re building more, creating tens of thousands of domestic jobs with wind power.

There’s hope. Many in the United States are trying to get our government to act. This Saturday, 32 Maine locations, from Caribou to Blue Hill to Falmouth, will host activities as part of a national initiative to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent before 2050. The locations are listed at www.stepitup.org. I’ll be back and I’ll join you.

Hey, nobody’s surprised that the folks in the Middle Ages were too imprudent to save themselves. But we can’t excuse those in the 21st century who are just as foolish.

Pat LaMarche, a former Green candidate for governor and for vice president, can be contacted at PatLaMarche@hotmail.com.