Our World and Everything in It

Tropical storm Nargis hit Myanmar (Burma) on Saturday. As many as 24 million people have been affected by the storm, and the death toll may be as many as 10,000. It is one of the poorest countries on the planet with this event the second largest to hit Southeast Asia since the tsunami.

The funny part is that rumors and complaints by the many Buddhists that live there is that the strict militant junta government did not act to warn them in time. The people learned of the storm too late and the state run media didn’t issue warnings to save them.

Not hard to believe after seeing what happened in the streets of Myanmar last September. The government brutality against the peaceful protests of Buddhist monks, and cameras stopped in the middle of filming to keep it out of the public eye does not indicate that this country is moving toward democracy as it has been prodded to do so by many.

As a matter of fact, there is a referendum relative to democratic elections for the country due May 10^th, and the unethical junta ruled government doesn’t plan on changing the date. They claim that people all over the country are looking forward to it. Considering many don’t have homes, power, food, or water, I doubt it. The government there hasn’t even asked for major aid yet, although it’s rolling in from many places now that the word is out about the extent of devastation. This area is not new to devastating cyclones and typhoons. A sophisticated early warning system might be the most humanitarian offering for this area in the long run. Ditto for new dikes in New Orleans.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7384041.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7384552.stm

This is a self portrait by an elephant. Catch the video on the You Tube link below. The picture was light and I had to go over the lines and couldn’t do it very well and I am an artist! Elephant painting is not new. There is Surapa of the Buffalo Zoo who paints, and quite well, although abstract and contemporary, and Lucky of Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs who paints well enough to be showcased in galleries. But this latest elephant painting is a little unsettling, and should make us reconsider our attitude toward animals, especially the needless slaughter of what we deem expendable because they are supposedly inferior to us.

Many earlier explanations about animals being  inferior to humans are slowly being dispelled. For instance, the idea that an animal doesn’t recognize itself in a mirror. It supposedly thinks it’s another animal. But,  I watched Good Morning America not long ago preview another elephant whose trainer put a white paint mark on its head. When the elephant looked in a mirror later on, it immediately went to a nearby wooden fence and tried to rub it off. As far as animals not having feelings, I watched a whole herd of elephants gather around the mother of a dead baby elephant that was lying at her feet, their trunks hanging down in mourning. They stood together for a long time. Another excuse for inferiority is relative to language. Apes have successfully learned sign language to communicate with humans, and Alex the African Grey parrot was phenomenal for not only stating what something was, but also the color, and composition of the object. Poor Alex died not long ago. As I write this my African Grey, Curtis, is trying to put a hole in my sweatshirt. He calls me Ree’rah for Ria. It sounds like Astro, the dog on the Jetsons, is saying my name. Having a pet that calls you by name feels way too human. I honestly think that by treating animals with a little more respect we too could become more human again. It’s called a reverence for life.

As an English major, I had the pleasure to run across some mighty powerful classic short stories about animals. One of the most poignant stories I read was particularly relative to elephants. I don’t really want to read it again because of the intense description at the end of the story. Take the time to read ”Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell. It’s short and powerful enough to bring up many ethical questions. When I think that elephants have been slaughtered for their tusks only, slaughtered because they stepped on coffee plants in a plantation that robbed them of most of their habitat, abused in circuses, given poor living conditions in many zoos because they need to belong to a large herd, like a society, not just in pairs, I have to wonder who the inferior species is sometimes. We’re supposed to have the big brains, and a conscience that leads to a big heart. But I’m not seeing a lot of that lately.

Read “Shooting an Elephant” : http://www.elephantcountryweb.com/Elliestories.html#Shooting%20an%20Elephant

About Surapa: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/NYBUFsurapa.html

About Lucky: http://www.cmzoo.org/elephantart.html

You Tube video of self portrait painting elephant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po1KEPz43AE&feature=related

Today, June 5, is World Environment Day. The theme is “Melting Ice – a Hot Topic” in support of International Polar Year, which runs from 2007 to 2008 according to the website Environment news Service, http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2007/2007-06-05-03.asp. Tromso, Norway will host the event this year.

Melting polar ice is worse than we think. The article went on to say that the actual melt rate of glaciers into the Gulf of Alaska has nearly doubled since 1995. We should all be concerned, very concerned. Its effects will be felt by people in the tropics, temperate climates and large cities around the globe not only people living in Artic or ice capped mountainous regions because an estimated 1.5 billion people are dependent on water from rivers impacted by melting snow and ice. That would be our Northwestern states. The ice caps in Glacier National Park are disappearing at an alarming rate. The flow of water from yearly spring melts is what sustains the tributaries that maintain the water supplies of many cities out West. The increased rate of melting will eventually see the last of the water from those mountaintops and then what?

About 300 million people are dependent on snow and ice melting in periods with low precipitation. In Central Asia, Peru and Chile, large land areas are completely reliant on melting water from snow and glaciers. And melting snow and glaciers on the mountains of Asia alone could affect about 40 percent of Earth’s population, the report warns. The Norwegian Minister of the Environment said that we have started an accelerating process and do not know its outcome. Norway is one of the countries in an area that will see the first results of ocean levels rising and gobbling up shorelines.

As the ice and snow melt, avalanches occur that dump into glacial lakes causing the water to stir up and levels to rise. Many of these lakes are unstable with large areas of methane gas at the bottom. The report explains that rising temperatures, coupled with the thawing of frozen land or permafrost, are leading to the creation of new lakes and the expansion of existing lakes in places like Siberia, which are releasing bubbles of methane, estimated to be 43,000 years old.

The first global warming event that scientists have been able to reliably trace, took place 40 million years ago and was caused by the release of too much methane gas when the earth was still unstable. I looked into this quite a while ago and the most frightening aspect was that the climate temperature only rose a ½ degree and slowly over a period of a thousand years compared to what we are experiencing now with a rapid change of possibly 1 degree in a little over a hundred years. The event caused the earth to incinerate.

Make no mistake. This is not the same temperature change we experience on a daily basis where a few days ago it was 85 degrees and today it is 66 degrees. This is about over all climate change across the entire world that drastically affects everything. So the next time you hear someone like Regis Philbin say, “One degree, I’m really scared” and make fun of it on TV, don’t rely on his or her common logic or should I say stupidity. It does not apply here and is not about the temperature fluctuation we experience seasonally or on a daily basis.

With less snow and sea ice the surrounding land will absorb more heat from the sun and polar oceans that will speed up the process even more. Anyone that skis the slopes in the winter knows about the reflected sunlight off the snow. With no snow the sunlight is simply absorbed. Sunglasses are a necessity and is it just me or is the sun getting to be sickening in strength? I can remember when I was young; it was possible to look directly at the sun for at least a few seconds. Now the glare is simply too strong to forego sunglasses when it’s a sunny day. Is this an effect from the loss of the reflective layer in our artic poles that protected us for so long? I do know that pets that are outside all of the time suffer cataracts earlier than pets kept indoors. I don’t doubt that in the future there may be warnings about keeping your animals outdoors at all as the ice and polar caps melt and the reflective process decreases. After that it may not be long before we are asked to stay indoors as much as possible. What kind of life will that be?