11 09 11 Joining Others in Caring For God’s Creation



Over the weekend I was a speaker at a truly awesome event called One People, One Earth. It brings together Alaskan leaders from the scientific, religious and Native American communities to speak about how essential it is to make a priority of Earth Care. This particular event was on climate change, calling for the government to follow through on the Supreme Court's order for the EPA to come up with clean air regulations on carbon emissions.

As you know carbon in the biggest single contributor to human greenhouse gas emissions, showing up primarily in CO2. As you may also know, climate change has warmed Alaska twice as much so far as the Lower 48. The oceans are absorbing so much carbon that sea life is visibly suffering.[1]

We are trying to get as many Alaskans as we can to sign a petition calling for the administration to follow through on this. Please go to this web site, read the petition and sign. http://onepeopleoneearth.org/ . We hope to have several thousand Alaskan signatures before our next One People, One Earth event, to be held in Juneau during the spring legislative session.

Today, some of the participants have been in email conversation regarding the current storms in Western Alaska, and have decided to post some of our comments on our web site. I'm not sure how long it will take our techie to get it up. This is what they have asked to use from me:

This storm has the potential to repeat one of last year's disasters, only on a much wider scale. It was only last week that the Alaska VOAD (Volunteer Agencies Active in Disasters) decommissioned a disaster recovery team that was put together for the Village of Savoonga after a December 2010 storm blew salt water into the town's electric transformers and wrecked havoc throughout the village. It takes that long for a community to recover from a storm. The storm blowing in yesterday and today could do it all again, only it is hitting many other communities as well. Climate change has made it so that the sea ice no longer forms before the big storms come. This is new, dangerous for people and coastal wildlife, and immensely expensive.

We simply have to take action to reduce carbon emissions. It is our moral obligation, because human beings must care about the welfare of other human beings; and human beings must care about the ecosystems that make life on this planet possible.


Also, in a couple of weeks they will have some edited portions from our weekend presentation on the web site.

So, go to the web site and sign, and watch to see what this storm does to the Alaska coastline!

[1] For more on this see www. 350.org. they have a great link to articles on explanations for laypersons on the science involved

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