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Environment, Energy and Economies - A Canadian Primer: MOTHER EARTH NEEDS HELP Ray Hamm

Some parts of Earth are getting overloaded and tired. Mother Earth needs help from some babysitters to take care of her children. If you have a cat, you know there is litter box to take care of, or else a corner in the barn that needs to be cleaned out once in a while. The time has come, there needs to be some caretaking, some cleaning up after human activity in our world. If Mother Earth is tired, who will carry and sustain us?


There has been enough human activity, especially the use of fossil fuels - coal, oil and natural gas - to have a dramatic impact on the overall balance for life on Earth. Other sources of energy are available. Of course, population has increased but the increase in energy use is way beyond this. Everything we do, every activity, takes energy. Every time energy is used, there is some leftover, a footprint, some waste. (This is about energy. There are many other environmental impacts resulting from human activity.)


Fossil fuels came into large-scale use in the Industrial Revolution (1800’s). First it was coal and then oil and natural gas. Using these fuels produces greenhouse gases (GHG). Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main GHG. For a long time, Earth could process, clean up, this product of human activity. But in recent decades, the system is overloaded. Mother Earth needs help.


GHG act as insulation in the atmosphere and less heat from the earth escapes out into space. Light from the sun still gets in as usual, but heat cannot get out as usual. This heat is absorbed by the atmosphere, the oceans, and the land. Gradually average temperature of the whole earth begins to rise. Conditions were relatively stable for decades, even centuries, but in the middle of the 20th century the level of CO2 in the atmosphere began increasing dramatically.


The earth and the climate are large and complicated. How it all works together is amazing. It takes time for the balance, the way it has always worked, to change. But change has begun. In the 1980’s, 30 years after the rapid rise in CO2 began, the rate of average temperature rise doubled from the previous century,


Young children are taught to clean up, to pick up, after themselves. Now we humans, especially in the advanced industrial societies, need to clean up after ourselves. Our ‘success’ has made trouble for us, for Earth. 


ACAN seeks to educate and inspire sustainable practices in our community.

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