Friday, October 10, 2014

Chasing Ice - Again

You may have watched the 2012 documentary,  Chasing Ice.  This clip is of the calving event shown in the documentary except that it presents the ice field in the perspective of Manhattan.



It's when the ice sheet is presented with a Manhattan graphic overlay (@ 3:40 mark) that the enormity of the calving strikes home.

2 comments:

  1. Often times, I find myself wondering, who'll be best off in the coming years?
    Those who can hunt? Those who can farm?
    I worry how change will come, in a huge disaster that shakes our very perception of the world, or a cascade of failures on our part?
    The danger keeping me up at night, nowadays, is the ongoing and worsening crisis affecting our food supply chain.

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  2. Upgrading Canada's food security has to be a joint federal-provincial effort. Yet it's just another critical problem that gets almost no traction on the political level.

    We need to be mindful of what is happening in other, less advantaged nations. They're the miner's canary for what could lie in store for Canada.

    I recently did an online course about global food security and, yes, the situation is worrisome. It's tragic how rich nations can use their wealth to tie up the best farmland in food stressed parts of the world where we in the West routinely have to send massive amounts of food relief to stave off famine.

    Britain's food giants are big on this. Their term for it is "following the sun." When Britain's strawberry season is over they shift production to Spain and then into Africa or South America - whatever is necessary to keep fresh berries on the store shelves year round. Eventually they tie up prime farmland in food stressed countries like Kenya. Asians, meanwhile, have got a lock on the best farmland in famine-plagued Somalia.

    These global predators migrate to nations where land title is weak or non-existent. Then all it takes is a bit of money to get local authorities to expel farmers from lands that may have been worked by their ancestor for centuries.

    It's hard to know how change will come, Troy. The manner in which our governments are abrogating responsibility on these issues suggests that, however it comes on, we won't be able to do much about it. Last week's report that the Earth has lost half of its wild life over the past 40-years was simply ignored at the political level. It's already been consigned to the memory hole. That speaks volumes for what we're facing.

    Me, I'm going to get out to the range more regularly after the New Year.

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