A Force for Good by Daniel Goleman

Author:Daniel Goleman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-06-22T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Heal the Earth

“At the height of the last Ice Age, when glaciers covered much of North America, there was a sheet of ice about a mile high where we sit today, and sea levels were almost four hundred feet lower.” The Dalai Lama heard those words spoken at an MIT meeting by John Sterman, head of the systems dynamics group at that university.

The earth’s temperature during that Ice Age averaged nine degrees Fahrenheit colder than at present. And by 2100, Sterman continued, the average temperature will be nine degrees Fahrenheit warmer, if we stay to our present course.

Sterman’s research group had created a computer model of the link between carbon emissions and the earth’s temperature. Showing the direct relationship—the more emissions, the hotter the temperature—he asked the audience at MIT, “When do we need to start lowering emissions to keep the planet’s temperature at a range we can stand?”

The consensus came back: around 2016—in about two years. “Wrong,” Sterman said. “We need to cut emissions now,” not just by using less fossil fuel but by restoring forests and lowering CO2 levels in a range of other ways.

The Dalai Lama was listening intently. He praised the precision of Sterman’s science and then took this to another level. “It’s a question of the survival of all the beings on the planet,” he emphasized, and it’s our moral responsibility to keep everyone safe—around the world as well as in future generations.

Our planet is our home, the Dalai Lama says, so caring for the environment means caring for your own home. But just as it would be foolish to burn the furniture in your room to keep warm, he cautions, the way we are living on the planet is consuming it.

“A genuine concern for humanity means loving the environment.”

But so many of us look only at our immediate interests. Even if people know of the long-term consequences, he adds, “They think, It doesn’t matter—that will all be in the future. I’m just concerned with now. But it’s a problem no one will be able to escape.”

To bring that home (at least the Dalai Lama’s home), take the Bara Shigri glacier, just about one hundred mostly impassable mountain miles to the northeast of Dharamsala. That glacier has been shrinking by more than ninety feet yearly, a sign of what’s happening throughout the Himalayas.

The Dalai Lama saw a recent image of Bara Shigri glacier, shown to him by Diana Liverman, a former chair of environmental sciences at the University of Oxford, who now teaches at the University of Arizona. Liverman used Bara Shigri as an example of how the human impact on our planet has accelerated in the last sixty years.

That impact does more than make glaciers melt, she added. It poses threats to life that range from waning water supplies and unbreathable air to the death of species and acidifying of oceans—and more.

While some trace the beginning of the human assault on the planet to the Industrial Revolution, Liverman focused on what she calls the Great Acceleration, which began in the 1950s.

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