Drowning Polar Bears, etc

I have been writing about the drowning Polar Bears here for many months and thinking about them too.... Now the Bush administration wants to list them as threatened. Too little too late.

Juliet Eilperin, writing in the Washington Post yesterday http://tinyurl.com/ycf34y referenced the National Center for Atmospheric Research projection that summer sea ice, upon which they depend, could disappear by 2040.

Meanwhile, they are drowning, swimming as much as 80 miles out to sea looking desperately for seals to feed themselves and their young. The images in my mind of these heroic, ancient, gorgeous creatures swimming 80 miles in a state of starvation to feed themsleves and their young, only to drown, contrasts unbearably with the global demand for new housing and big cars that create carbon emissions. There are instances of them resorting to cannibalism and wandering into human settlements: desperately, desperately famished, weak with hunger.

In the Tufts Health Newsletter that came today, readers are encouraged to eat salmon and sardines- tho tempered with judicious awareness of how we have poisoned the seas and the fisheries and hence, ourselves. What wasn't even mentioned was how farmed salmon depends on caught wild species, further weakening and decimating the worlds fisheries.

Also today, CNN reported that we can eat cloned animals- tho many will die for each edible "product." So other animals are now a factory matter indeed and the casualties, living beings, in this process are as incidental as bycatch in the fisheries or the collateral damages spoken of in war when civilians are murdered. So who are the civilians now? Who are we at war with? I say everything living, including ourselves. In the guise of life we are pusueing death more avidly than the famished Polar Bears are pursueing ever-retreating seals.

This is an unspeakable world we have created. And I confess, every time I get in my car or use my computer, I am well aware of my personal contribution.