By Johnny W. Lee
Development of Nature
The anthropocentric view of nature is constantly being communicated and society, the receiver of this message, has taken it for granted. In Communicating Nature Corbett mentions in the introduction “this park, like many parks, has a taken-for-granted quality to the average visitor. You understand the message being communicated and you accept it—it’s a park because it has green grass, benches, walking paths, interpretive signs, and is designed for humans.” By looking at what is being communicated around us we can start to notice the real message and its purpose. For example, when we take a glance at the tree outside out the window and then compare it to the trees in the mountains we may look at them differently, but that would be abasement to nature. They are still both trees, but they can be interpretive differently. As stated in Communicating Nature Corbett mentions in chapter 1: “Your belief system is both an individual and a cultural product. The environmental history of this country, your childhood and adult experiences with the natural world, the beliefs of your parents and significant others—these all helped to develop your environmental beliefs.”
As we develop, we gain our own views on nature. A person growing up in the countryside may have a different view of nature than a city-dweller. Direct experiences involve contact with the natural world that is untouched by human activity. Indirect experiences also involve contact with the natural world, but in a setting that involves a “regulated nature.” Lastly, symbolic experiences don’t include any physical contact, but rather are conveyed though a media type. We at one point in our lives have all experienced this “nature” through direct, indirect, or symbolic experiences. And of course, some more than others.
I personally started to notice my own view of nature as I took the bioregional quiz in Communicating Nature in chapter 1, a quiz that tested how well you understand the natural environment I lived in. One question that stood out to me in that quiz was “trace the water you drink from its source to your faucet.” It had never crossed my mind before, the water that I use every day to drink, to wash, and to clean. I never questioned it, but rather taken for granted that it was just there. I eventually found out that the water came from aquifers, underground water wells. As a result of communication of the world around us, we each form our own environmental ideologies. As pointed in Communicating Nature, the scale can range from anthropocentric, which is human–centered, to ecocentric, which is nonhuman-centered.
As mentioned in Chapter 2 of Communicating Nature, “it’s important to emphasize that a person’s belief system informs and guides behavior, but may not be entirely consistent with it. The reason for the disconnect may lie at the individual level; I may believe that all living creatures are valuable, but my words or actions might contradict that.” A person may believe in one ideology, but may act different due to society around them. At one extreme, ecocentric may seem like anti–human, but as mentioned in Communicating Nature, “there is plenty of room for humans in ecocentric ideologies; it is the relative role of humans that shifts. Ecocentric ideologies recognize humans as an interdependent part of a larger biotic community and with a desire to behave more humbly toward the life systems that sustain them.”
Climate Change
A classic example is climate change as it is the result of our own environmental ideologies. As a result our climate is changing. As mentioned in “How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen” Mann mentions “Roughly three-quarters of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions come from burning fossil fuels, and roughly three-quarters of that comes from just two sources: coal in its various forms, and oil in its various forms, including gasoline.” In “Global Warming’s Terrible New Math” McKibben mentions “Neither China nor the United States, which between them are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, was prepared to offer dramatic concessions.” For me I feel that climate change is already under way at this rate. The documentary Earth 2100 also shows a hypothetical event where Chain and India are not willing to reduce carbon emission. This hypothetical event, however, may start to bear fruit as it mentioned In “Global Warming’s Terrible New Math” McKibben points out “what happens in the U.S. is most important for how it will influence China and India, where emissions are growing fastest.”
These articles and documentary touch on the subject of climate change that is a growing environmental problem for the world, but they also focus on the numbers behind them. Today, we see large amounts of information being spread through advertisements and news report. In the media the message being communicated is “Americans encounter climate change mainly in the form of three graphs, staples of environmental articles. The first shows that atmospheric carbon dioxide has been steadily increasing. The second graph shows rising global temperatures. The third graph typically shows the consequences such models predict, ranging from worrisome (mainly) to catastrophic (possibly),” as mentioned in “How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen.” The list goes on, but the general idea is emerging—the climate is slowly changing.
People have their own ideologies in which they recognize humans in a certain spot. In “Global Warming’s Terrible New Math” McKibben speaks out on the globe temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius. While 2 degrees Celsius may not seem like large difference in temperature, the increase can starting the melting of the polar ice caps which can a rise in sea levels. This rise in sea level comes from the thermal expansion in which warm water expands much more than cold water. As the water gets warmer the volume of the sea gets larger. We can image the results of this in the documentary Earth 2100 where it shows the potential flood of New York City.
The documentary also focuses on the world’s carbon dioxide emission which is at an all-time high. In “Global Warming’s Terrible New Math” McKibben mentions “scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees.” Generally most of the greenhouse effect is due to the water vapor in the atmosphere and the second largest contributor in carbon dioxide. Water vapor is not so much important since if there is a vast amount of water vapor in the atmosphere it would just starting raining it down back as water. Carbon dioxide, on the other, hand does just come back down it sits in the atmosphere absorbing heat and rereleasing it back to the earth.
One statement that stood out in “Global Warming’s Terrible New Math” is where McKibben states “we're in the same position we've been in for a quarter-century: scientific warning followed by political in–action.” It talks about the failure to meet and combated these problems in the world. I feel this is a common reoccurring theme in politics. The scientific warning comes first, but no one wants to act. By the time people want to act is may be too late for action. As mentioned by McKibben in “Global Warming’s Terrible New Math”, “environmental efforts to tackle global warming have failed. The planet's emissions of carbon dioxide continue to soar, especially as developing countries emulate (and supplant) the industries of the West.” Even in the documentary, Everything's Cool, Dr. Heidi mentions activists and scientists have been trying to rouse the government into taking action to fight global warming.
Unabated planetary warming and its ocean structure since 2006
In a recent Nature Letters article published in 2015 titled “Unabated planetary warming and its ocean structure since 2006” Dr. Wijffels mentions that while there is a “pause” in the surface warming of the land their results has shown the heat content of the oceans has increased since 2006. This study was accomplished using “500 autonomous profiling floats spaced about every 3° of latitude and longitude, each providing a temperature/salinity profile every 10 days.” Using these little probes they were able to survey the ocean heat gain from the period of 2006 to 2013. The style of Dr. Wijffels’ article in presented in a way to highlight the important of planetary warming by presenting his results first. Dr. Wijffels mentions the importance of this study as he states “about 93% of this net planetary energy increase is stored in the oceans, a result of the large heat capacity of sea water relative to air, the ocean’s dominance of the planet’s surface area, and the ocean’s ability to transport excess heat away from the surface into deep waters.” This is important since when we tend to think of the climate changing we don’t tend to think of the ocean at first.
I found this article interesting because even though you may not notice the land getting warmer it doesn’t mean that nothing is happening at all. The study also mentioned that “most of the heat gain (67 to 98%) occurred in the Southern Hemisphere extratropical ocean.” The study, however, does not survey all of the ocean, but Dr. Wijffels mentioned “recent successful deployment of prototype Argo floats sampling to 6,000 meters needs to be followed by systematic Argo coverage of the deep and abyssal oceans.” While this is not a complete mapping of the ocean, Dr. Wijffels and his team will work on this project in the coming years to show the rest of the oceans. Overall the end goal of Dr. Wijffels project will allow “a longer Argo record will provide accurate estimates of total ocean heat storage and its spatial distribution by ocean, position and depth. The most direct and accurate means of observing energy accumulation in the climate.” While this study shows a glimpse of the ocean it also shows another view of climate change. Even if you do not feel the climate changing in your everyday life, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t happening in the background.
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