on the climate change bandwagon

and let me make it clear - there's nothing wrong with being on it.

this morning's globe and mail has a feature section on climate change. they call it the climate change almanac, with alphabetic listings of things we should all know about global warming. and i'm reading it, and agreeing with it, and j and i are lying in bed with coffee and our sections of the paper and discussing how to live with a smaller environmental footprint.

and there's a picture splashed across the head of one of the pages - polar bears on these tiny little bits of ice - and i say to j, "this is the saddest picture i've seen in a long time." it's so sad that i want to clip it out and post it on my bulletin board in my office to remind myself of the slippery slope of self-justification, the larger impacts of my decisions.

so i go to my office and google the photographer, one Dan Crosbie, and the picture. and i find that the pic itself, apparently taken in 2004, is famously controversial. evidently rush limbaugh has found out that the picture is a "fraud". the polar bears, he says, are "frolicking" on said ice floe, and that use of the photo to illustrate the effects of global warming is, to paraphrase, bullshit. in fact, while online, i find a whole bunch of right wing pundits taking issue with this picture, as if the fact that it's being used out of context (apparently, the original title of the photo presented the bears as being on naturally occurring ice sculptures) makes the fact of global warming untrue.

wtf???? that the photo captures the pathos of global warming - that the image of polar bears stranded on an increasingly small bit of arctic real estate eloquently expresses something that scientific talk of carbon loads and acidification and desertification fails to - is in my mind the beauty of the photograph. because whether or not the bears were, at the moment the photo was taken, waving or drowning makes little difference. they're drowning now. and the discrepancy in those two positions makes the pic all the more poignant.

so i'm still clipping the pic and posting it on my bulletin board. because my heart responds to it. and if my heart responds, then my head responds. and if my head responds, then maybe i can live my little life a little more mindfully. and it might not be much in the grand scheme of things, but it's something. and that little something is all i got to give.

two little feet - karen savoca