Pages tagged "Climate change"

[Friends are not sufficiently] sensitized to environmental issues, and the result has been that we are now only slightly more awake to their significance than the average American . . . [As] individuals, many of us have become involved with environmental organizations, or have spoken out on special concerns within the environmental arena. But we have failed to see the overall magnitude and urgency of the environmental crisis . . . We have failed to see that the environmental crisis has a towering spiritual dimension, which must be addressed if the crisis is to be resolved . . .

Wanna buy baby?” I was eleven years old and traveling with my family in Latin America. We were climbing up a dirt path in the humid heat when we passed a young woman, perhaps only five or six years older than I was. She was holding an infant in her arms.

This year I retired from a quarter century of teaching college geoscience. A major challenge accompanying this new venture has been making investment decisions I have little experience with. In doing so, I must, of course, protect our family “nest egg,” so we can continue to pay the bills, take care of emergencies, and help with the extended family.

The award-wining 2012 documentary film, Chasing Ice, paints a beautiful and profoundly disturbing picture of the rapid retreat of glaciers from our planet. This film was made by Jim Balog, who founded the Extreme Ice Survey in 2001 to document the dramatic impact of climate change on the polar regions of our planet.

In 2012, Bill McKibben began his “Do the Math” tour in Seattle. This was a talk that McKibben took on the road to spread the idea that humans are trying to extract more fossil fuels than we can safely burn – that is, more than we can burn while staying within a safe temperature on the planet. In other words, our burning of fossil fuels is creating greenhouse gasses in quantities that exceed the limits that we can live with.

Dear Editor: I read with interest the article “Quakers, Climate, and Money” in the May/June 2015 issue of Western Friend. I am always happy when Friends concern themselves as individuals with the future that climate change will bring, and take action. I would like your readers to know, however, that in deciding how to handle invested assets, they may find useful information by reading about the movement for divestment from fossil fuel companies that is going on worldwide. The Friend who wrote the article may find additional information that could change his opinion about the values of shareholder activism vs. divestment.

Dear Editor: Many thanks to Kate McClellan for her letter in the November/December 2018 Western Friend. I appreciated her pointing out that the climate crisis and other environmental crises are not really going to affect the earth fundamentally, but only the biosphere of the earth (which includes us, homo sapiens). The earth will be just fine with or without us. We are not really trying to save the earth; we are trying to save ourselves. What an arrogant species we are!