[Marxism] Mike Davis on climat change in the American South-west

[Einde O'Callaghan <einde@xxxxxx>]

article | posted April 3, 2007 (web only)

Denial in the Desert

by MIKE DAVIS

[posted online on April 3, 2007]

The polar bear on its shrinking ice floe has become the urgent icon of 
global warming and runaway climate change. Even the flat-earther in the 
White House now concedes that the magnificent bears may be doomed to 
extinction as the sea ice melts and the Arctic Ocean is transformed into 
open blue water for the first time in millions of years. Humanity's 
"great geophysical experiment," as the oceanographer Roger Revelle long 
ago characterized the steeply rising curve of carbon dioxide emission, 
has knocked nature off its Holocene foundations in the circumpolar lands.

But the Arctic is not the only theater of spectacular and unequivocal 
climate change, nor are the polar bears the only heralds of a new age of 
chaos. Consider, for example, some of Ursus maritimus's distant 
relatives: the black bears that forage happily but ominously in the 
fabled Chisos Mountains of Texas's Big Bend National Park. They may be 
the messengers of an environmental transformation in the Borderlands 
almost as radical as that taking place in Alaska or Greenland.

Rest at: <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070416/davis_2>

Einde O'Callaghan


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism