Without serious and urgent action, we will disappear. Failure to change endangers our survival. I get the message from the August Photo of the Month: ‘Melting Vitruvian Man’ by Nick Cobbing.
On the Arctic Sea Ice in the Fram Strait near Norway, Los Angeles artist John Quigley, assisted by the crew of the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, created a giant display. Quigley said “We came here to create the ‘Melting Vitruvian Man’, after Da Vinci’s famous sketch of the human body, because climate change is literally eating into the body of our civilisation. When he did this sketch it was the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the dawn of this innovative age that continues to this day, but our use of fossil fuels is threatening that.”
In the last century, humans have gone from horseback to the moon, from sheet fed printing presses to video streaming on the Internet. After this explosion of change in a blink of evolutionary time, how can we not use our creative energy to innovate our transportation and energy infrastructures to save the climate?
On September 6, the US-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre, reported Arctic sea ice reached the second lowest level for the month in the 1979 to 2011 satellite record. Throughout August, sea ice extent tracked near the record lows of 2007, underscoring the continued decline in Arctic ice cover. And there is still more melting to come this year.
With rising sea levels threatening island nations of the Pacific, you have to wonder what kind of events it will take before the masses get the big picture.