Can We Save the Polar Bear?

Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organisation, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection..."

Krishnamurti

Greetings

The need for Wild Law is urgent and profound. So it is marvellous to see so many dedicated people giving so freely of their time and resources to advance the initiative.

Having been privileged to watch the genesis of the Wild Law movement within the UK from its earliest days, it has astonished me how much progress has been made so quickly in moving forward a conceptual framework that is so necessary, so bravely radical, yet at the same time so vulnerable to superficial dismissal accordingly.

So to help get the up-coming event off to a flying start and attempt to focus and galvanise thinking, at the risk of being controversial I would like to dispense summarily with one the questions raised on the flyer here and now.



Delegates are asked to consider:

‘Can we save the polar bear and Arctic communities using existing legal models?’

The answer Is very simple.

No. We cannot. Much though I regret to say so. Other than via the arguably worse alternative – at minimum from the polar bears’ point of view – of a life sentence without commutation in zoos. Or perhaps via some kind of unsavoury and open-ended feeding programme on the Arctic islands or wherever else they might happen to wash up when the polar ice disappears.

The latest prediction is that the Arctic will be ice free in summer by 2030. Which tolls the death knell for a highly specialised pure carnivore adapted to predate seals through ice.


http://www.theecologist.org/news_detail.asp?content_id=1038



Unfortunately, the very idea that Wild Law can somehow prevent that from happening indicates that as a body, in spite of the commitment, the advocates of Wild Law have yet to fully appreciate what is at stake and grasp the nettle, and, in that respect at least, differ little from the population at large. For it is to remain in denial, as I believe George Monbiot pointed out tellingly to the Environmental Law Foundation not so long ago.


Why? Simply because of the lead time on dissipation of global warming gases. No one knows what it is - as it is unknowable in advance - but the consensus formerly lay somewhere between a decade and 25 years to stabilise. The BBC website states:

One of the main problems with carbon dioxide is the length of time it remains in the atmosphere as it can take around 100 years for it to disperse (even after some of it is absorbed by vegetation). Therefore, even if we stopped CO2 emissions immediately, the effects of what we've already done would still influence our weather for years to come.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/evidence/too_late.shtml


To keep the maths easy, take a conservative estimate of 13 years. This means were we to stop all greenhouse emissions today, global warming would not decline to its normal background until 2020. By which time most of the Arctic, which is nothing but a huge lump of ice floating in the sea, will have melted.

The chances of what then remains being viable in an ocean that is already heating up seem slim. And that analysis leaves aside the frightening prospect that positive feedback mechanisms – of which there are several reasonably postulated – have not kicked in already and produced runaway global warming quite regardless of what we might do.

But there is no prospect of us ceasing all greenhouse activities today. Or tomorrow. Or for the foreseeable future. The political will is simply not there. We are not even on target to cut emissions back to Kyoto levels, which are way higher. To quote the BBC again:

To stabilise climate change altogether, emissions of CO2 would have to be reduced by around 70% globally - the Kyoto Protocol doesn't propose reductions of anything near this level.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/evidence/too_late.shtml


We have to get clear in our thinking and see that Wild Law [u]alone[/u] is not, and cannot be, an effective response to the crisis that we have already unleashed and is inevitably bearing down upon us. The lead times are simply too long. To explain that further would lengthen this contribution excessively, so I will post them separately under the heading ‘Is there time for Wild Law?’

Suffice to say that the above analysis gives us a window of only 10 years to save even the last iceberg that might remain, and that is based on a most generous assumption. About the time [i]An Inconvenient Truth[/i] came out in 2005, Al Gore gave us about 10 years to make the critical decisions if we were to turn things around in time. I regret to say I believe his estimate to be optimistic. Since then two years have passed with nothing meaningful having happened by way of response. Meanwhile the Arctic continues its meltdown at unprecedented rates.

It is critical to understand that what is at stake here is not merely the future of the polar bear. Nor that of all the other creatures that make their homes there, from reindeer, caribou and arctic foxes, through to the vast number of migratory birds which nest and raise their young during the Arctic summer, many of which pass through this country twice a year on route.

The polar regions are critical in the global circulation of both and atmosphere and oceans, and in maintaining the equilibrium between incoming and outgoing radiation on a planetary basis. Without the Arctic we will be in an unprecedented and therefore unpredictable situation – quite literally. But we do know enough to be sure that the changes in the global patterns of both will be dire.

For instance the chances are that the Gulf Stream, which is responsible for this countries anomalously benign climate, will almost certainly shift, if not cease.

To illustrate what that would mean consider this. New York City, with its famously ferocious winter, lies at 40.47 degrees of latitude. London, in contrast, is way to the north at 51.32. To put that in perspective, New York lies at about the same latitude as such balmy places as Madrid - 40.26 degrees, Ankara - 39.55, and Istanbul - 41.01. While London equates to somewhere way beyond the Canadian border, slightly north of such frigid venues as Calgary, a former Winter Olympic venue, at 51.01.

It would be over-simplistic to suggest that London will therefore become similar to Calgary weather-wise, but clearly the likelihood we must anticipate is for changes that are dramatic and inclement, to put it mildly. In turn this will radically effect the flora, and to appreciate what it will be like for us and our offspring we must understand that plant migration to plug the gaps is a thing that happens very slowly on the scale of human lifetimes.



What we must conclude from all of this is that whatever steps we now take, the probability is that catastrophe cannot be averted, and has to be anticipated. If we are prepared to look that in the eye, take it fully on board and choose to respond to it rationally, we must do so immediately – and that means by concrete actions. Merely talking is no longer sufficient, however laudable the objective.

Wild Law has a crucial role to play, and the faster it can be put into place the better. But we must be clear in seeing that it cannot be seen as an effective response to ward off the crisis that approaches. It is too long-term an endeavour, and time has already run out.

Instead we must see it as an essential tool that we desperately need to moderate the worst extremes that cannot now be avoided. And, perhaps most appropriately, in the healing and reordering that must inevitably follow.

So I wish you all the very best with your workshop, and would encourage all involved to do all in their power to further Wild Law up the agenda as swiftly as they possibly can.

But to also accept that the time for prevarication and excuses on a personal level is past, that the time to put their ecological footprint in order is now, and it is absolutely imperative that they do so.

Kindest regards


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