12 09 11 We All Live in a Bioshelter

Even without proof of global warming, we absolutely must deal with our carbon emissions, or we will be responsibility for the death of hundreds of millions. We know this is true, and I can tell you how we know.

It should not be a great surprise that our extravagant use of fossil fuels has created a huge problem. Even well-intentioned human behavior causes unexpected problems all the time and, once those problems present themselves, we have to deal with them.

A case in point is an issue we are currently facing on our bioshelter-home property. We thought we were solving one problem, but now realize we have actually created a new problem. Let me tell you the story.

Cindee and I are both allergic to cottonwoods. While trying to decide whether or not to make an offer to buy the place, the fact that it was set in cottonwoods was a serious point of discussion. Still, we were so interested in a more eco-friendly lifestyle that we decided we would find a way to deal with our allergies and live there. We bought the home.

After a couple of years living with the problem we came up with a brilliant idea. We decided to cut down a swath of cottonwood trees and replace them with fruit trees suitable for our sub-arctic environment. The plan was to cut down the trees and mill them into lumber for our raised-bed garden boxes, then replace the cottonwoods with fruit trees. The fruit trees would be a great advantage, since we are not allergic to them, and they would provide us with food that did not carry the negative carbon footprint that goes with flying fruit 1400 miles from Seattle.

For the most part, the plan has worked well. One area has been cleared, and we are waiting for the end of winter so we can begin thinking of moose-proof fences and the planting of seedlings. We have enjoyed a bit more sun, now that the trees are gone, which helps our garden boxes and our mini-greenhouse. However, there has been one unintended consequence; our gravel driveway is now alive with grass and chamomile.

It seems that the reason our gravel driveway has worked so well in the past has been because the cottonwood trees blocked the sun, making our driveway a very unfriendly plant environment. Grass, chamomile, dandelions and other herbal invaders were kept at bay by the simple fact that there was not enough light to allow them to take root in the poor soil of our driveway. Without the natural sun block, however, everything changed. One particular corner of our driveway has been taken over by chamomile, and the dandelions are preparing the way for grasses to come next.

It appears that we are on the verge of actually losing our driveway! We are going to have to decide what we are going to do to keep our driveway a driveway, and not a self-fertilizing compost bin, or a slippery run for mud-toboggans!

In a sense all of us live in a bioshelter. The earth, after all, is much more a bioshelter than our Alaskan house, even though it is our home that carries the name. The earth is more of a bioshelter because it is from the earth that life first emerged and has been sustained this whole time. So it is very fair to state that, in a sense, all of us live in a bioshelter. And living in a bioshelter requires us to understand that everything a person does in their bioshelter home affects everything else.

What this means, of course, is that none of us can help but have unintended impact on our bioshelter home. Yet, the urgency of need to drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels has been surprisingly difficult for Americans to accept. I believe there are two reasons for this strangely American difficulty.

The first is a spiritual reason. Some call it the self-serving nature of humans; Christians call it sin. John Calvin and others warned Christians that while we all know that temptations will come, we must especially watch out for the rationalizations that would lead to believe that we are justified in doing, or continuing in, improper behavior. When we must make a choice, doing what is most convenient, without carefully checking out the reasoning, is asking for trouble. It is simply too tempting to give-in to immediate gratification rather than carefully looking at what is really best, even if inconvenient. This self-serving side of human nature causes us to rationalize greed and selfishness as somehow virtuous, causes us to get caught up in over-consumption, causes us to ignore important needs in our relationships, and generally sets us up for big trouble at some later date. That is what is going on with the Global Warming situation right now.

However, the spiritual problem is not what is catching the media attention these days. The problem with accepting the urgency of global warming, we are told, is the problem of complexity. How can we know for sure that global warming is a human-caused problem?

Indeed, though scientists continue to develop more intricate models, taking more variables into account, it is doubtful whether their calculations are becoming significantly more accurate. Americans simply do not want to enter into inconvenient change unless they are absolutely certain that it is necessary.

That being said, however, our best models do predict that we can expect global warming to add between 3 and 11.5 degrees C by the end of the century, with approximately 4 degrees being the most likely value. Evaluations of actual measurements of climate warming since 1990, compared to the warming predicted by climate models, indicate that the mathematical models designed by the skeptics have been much less accurate than the models designed by mainstream scientists warning that we are in crisis.

Yet, no one can really prove that any of these scientists are right. The system is too complex for more than 90% accuracy. So far, our economic and political leaders have been refusing to make the changes necessary without absolute proof.

Yet, there is more proof of trouble available. Perhaps more troubling even than climate change is the huge network of problems all this carbon in the air is bringing to our oceans. The oceans absorb carbon dioxide out of the air. About half of the carbon burned off in human use of fossil fuels has been absorbed over the past 200 years. Currently, scientists estimate that about 25% of the carbon we humans are releasing into the air is still being absorbed.

What makes this so frightening is that the carbon dioxide is increasing the ocean’s acidity, making it less and less likely that the diversity of life available in our oceans will survive. Most immediately, those creatures that rely on calcium-based shells (corals, snails and many kinds of zooplankton) will die off, because the ocean will dissolve their shells away. Only a cursory awareness of world news tells us that there are signs that corals and others are already suffering!

The scientists I talk to tell me this may be an even bigger problem. Not being a scientist, I cannot speak long about this. However, as someone who tries to live a moral life, I am certain that we do not need more evidence that human consumption is overtaxing the life systems of earth. If climate warming danger is a 90% certainty, and ocean acidity is at all dangerous, we don’t have a moral leg left to stand on. We risk food and habitat for millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people. We also risk extinction for perhaps half of the currently living species.

Societal change must happen—convenient or not—expensive to this generation or not.