Bill McKibben writes:

On the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, let’s think for a moment about the Earth—backdrop for our busy and dramatic life, but also a planet.

One can observe it dispassionately, through scientific instruments, as if it were any other planet. And here’s how it looks, these past five decades:

• The white ice at the northern pole, one of the most obvious features on the planet, has shrunk dramatically: at least half the summer sea ice in the Arctic is now gone.
• The largest living systems on Earth have frayed badly: the Amazon and the African rain forests are threadbare, patchy, increasingly prone to fire. The coral reefs, including the giant system fringing the coast of Australia, are shrinking fast, bleaching white as hotter water sloshes through them.
• Great droughts have spread on the various continental landmasses, drying for a time some of the globe’s vast river systems—in the Colorado Basin, in the United States, and in the Murray-Darling Basin, in Australia—while storms of unprecedented intensity have lashed islands in the Pacific and the Atlantic.
• There has been, on average, a sixty-per-cent decline in populations of wild animals, part of an epic silencing with few precedents even in the deep record that geology provides.
• The composition of its atmosphere has changed with shocking speed, and, as a result, the temperature has risen sharply—in the air, in the oceans.

But one can also observe our planet passionately, through eye and hand and foot, through nose and ear and heart. [Continue reading…]