1 day more! Hmmm somebody needs to reshoot that les miz scene as Biden & Harris getting ready to move in, Ivanka bring left alone in the dark, Trump grimly anticipating his arrest and the national guard getting ready for an easy battle. Get right on that internet, okay?
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In the mean time hakai magazine has some good environmental news for a change. It’s a nice read for these trying times. Of course I’ll share the best bits.
An Antidote for Environmental Despair
We are living amid a planetary crisis. “I am hopeless,” a student in an environmental study graduate program recently told me. “I’ve seen the science. I am hopeless because the state of the planet is hopeless.”
It’s not surprising she feels so depressingly fatalistic. In his speech at the start of a two-week international conference in Madrid, Spain, in December 2019, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “The point of no return is no longer over the horizon. It is in sight and hurtling toward us.”
The environmental crisis is also a crisis of hope.
I believe the way to spread hope is to collectively challenge the tired narrative of environmental doom and gloom that reproduces a hopeless status quo, and replace it with an evidence-based argument that improves our capacity to engage with the real and overwhelming issues we face.
Hmm now what on earth could make a person feel HOPEFUL about the environment right now? When we’re destroying ecosystems at such a great rate. Surely there’s nothing that creates them as fast?
Natural climate solutions occur when we conserve and restore ecosystems—and improve land management. It’s thrilling to see how quickly life returns when given the opportunity. In the largest dam-removal project in the history of the United States, the Elwha River now runs freely from a snowfield in the mountains of Washington’s Olympic National Park to the Pacific Ocean. Salmon started to return to their natal waters upstream almost immediately after the dams were removed in 2014. Reservoir beds that looked like moonscapes now host vibrant young forests and wetlands where elk graze. The return of beavers to the Elwha watershed is a boon for salmon. Beavers drag branches, making shallow water channels where juvenile salmon can safely travel, and beaver dams create slower water habitats where the insects that salmon feed upon thrive.
And Washington gets out of the way and lets them do it. Sometimes you don’t need to swoop in and make things better. You just need to move out of the way and letter beavers do their job.
There are plenty of other wonderful examples of environmental recovery in the article that will soothe your savaged spirit. It ends with these wise words.
The vast scale, complexity, urgency, and destructive power of biodiversity loss, climate change, and countless other issues are real. Yet assuming a fatalistic perspective and positioning hopelessness as a foregone conclusion is not reality. It is a mindset, and it’s a widespread and debilitating one. It not only undermines positive change, it squashes the belief that anything good could possibly happen.
True that. Good things do happen and are indeed possible. I’m so old I remember when there had never been a statewide beaver discussion on the pacific coast and now the first EVER California Beaver Summit is going to be a reality.
I’m off this morning to chat with Eva Bishop of the Cornwall Beaver Trust about getting kids engaged and excited about beavers an using activities to educate. I guess she thinks we have some experience in that area.
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