Ongoing Challenges of Climate Change
Researchers working close to the edge of the eroding coastline at Peninsula Point, N.W.T., in 2019. (Photo: Weronika Murray)
Thawing Arctic permafrost seems like a distant threat. It’s not. People displaced by the collapsing ground could be Canada's first climate refugees. But the thaw should worry everyone.
— Susan Nerberg at Broadview Magazine (Formerly the UCC Observer) August 5, 2020
The sandhill cranes were oblivious to the destruction. About 500 metres from their tundra nest on Pelly Island in the Northwest Territories, a chunk of cliff four storeys high crashed into the ocean, sending the odour of broken earth and sulphur into the spray. The massive block of frozen mud and ice toppled so fast a group of scientists working nearby on the island’s shore didn’t have a chance to yell “Holy crap!” before it bombed the Beaufort Sea. But the sandhill cranes didn’t seem to notice, continuing their calls amid the rumble from the falling cliff.
If the catastrophic erosion of Pelly Island is an indication, climate change smells like brimstone and sounds like fury. . .
“Bizarre, isn’t it, that the most intellectual creature — surely, that’s ever lived on the planet — is destroying its only home. ”
Image by Christina Chung/Christina Chung, © All Rights Reserved
From the On Being Project, Krista Tippett interviews Jane Goodall about ‘What it Means to Be Human’.
Jane Goodall’s early research studying chimpanzees helped shape the self-understanding of our species and recalled modern Western science to the fact that we are a part of nature, not separate from it. From her decades studying chimpanzees in the Gombe forest to her more recent years attending to human poverty and misunderstanding, she reflects on the moral and spiritual convictions that have driven her, and what she is teaching and still learning about what it means to be human.