To Be Ignored by a Merganser
By Dale Goodner | 11th February 2008
It turned out to be a very snowy game, making the stadium seem like one of those glass balls you shake and watch the “snow” come down covering whatever is in the globe… which in this case was over 72 thousand of us crowded into Lambeau Field. My daughter, Sarah, and I had been in Green Bay to witness the playoff game between the Packers and the Seattle Seahawks. It was a beautiful setting and a picturesque playoff party (thanks to a Packer victory).
While in the area we did a little sightseeing. The deal was, I could do some birding and Sarah could do some shopping. Winter is an excellent time to be in Northeast Wisconsin. Arctic birds are plentiful, from snow buntings along country roads to several species of diving ducks wintering near the shore of Lake Michigan.
Near Manitowoc, a hooded merganser didn’t care about Seattle’s Seahawks or Green Bay’s Packers. It was nonchalantly swimming around in sub-freezing temperatures, diving under water, and coming up with fish. Just looking at him through binoculars made me cold. To him, I was just an insignificant and extraneous part of his environment.
To the Arctic ducks, whether Green Bay made it to the Super Bowl was completely irrelevant. If you are a merganser, human activities are unimportant… or are they? While it’s amazing how nonexistent our struggles seem to a surf scoter, what’s far more amazing is how very important we’ve actually become in the lives of wildlife throughout this entire planet, and not in a positive way.
Our impact, for example, upon Earth’s atmosphere has been staggering. This is, in fact, most noticeable in the Arctic where melt is proceeding at a faster than expected pace. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the atmosphere contained about 275 parts per million of carbon. Today that number has gone up by over a third. There are now 383 parts per million of carbon. That’s across the entire planet! That amount continues to rise as we raze forests and burn more and more fossils. In just a couple short centuries, we humans have made such a vast change to the planet that it’s beginning to appear that we are throwing the system off kilter. What is alarming is the brief amount of time it’s taken us to impact the atmosphere to such a degree.
The top six carbon pollution sources are as follows:
- 8.4 percent: fossil ‘fuel’ retrieval, processing, and distribution.
- 9.1 percent: land use and biomass burning, for fuel and cropland clearing.
- 12.9 percent: Residential and commercial.
- 19.2 percent: transportation fuels; gasoline and diesel.
- 20.6 percent: industrial processes.
- 29.5 percent: electric generating stations (mostly coal fired). These are the biggest single polluters. If we are to have a meaningful impact on global warming it should start here.
The problem is dramatically illustrated if you ever have the opportunity to approach Denver from the west on I 70 at night. The entire valley laid out at the foot of the front range is flooded with light, looking like a gigantic smoldering fire. Here in central Illinois, trainloads of coal stream in continuously to feed the power plants that line the Illinois River. But as we’re beginning to realize, our ability to light up our world at night comes at a great cost. Motel 6 may just have to stop saying, “we’ll leave the light on for you.”
We had found another good reason to modify our electricity consuming habits lying sprawled on a Lake Michigan beach. It was a very large and very dead salmon. In the words of the Munchkin undertaker, he was not just merely dead, but really most sincerely dead. Since it’s a top predator, it’s flesh is so contaminated by mercury, fisherman are warned to limit how much of it they consume, due to health concerns. As a kid, growing up along the shores of this “Shining Big Sea Water,” it seemed far too vast for us to be able to pollute.
The contamination of fish, around the world, and the huge jump in atmospheric carbon are linked. Coal-fired power plants are partly to blame. We are releasing carbon and other materials that have been locked up in coal and oil for hundreds of millions of years.
For the mergansers and scoters, we’ve become a bigger and bigger presence in their world. The fish they catch are now tainted with mercury. Their nesting areas to the north are increasingly impacted by the warming of the planet. Permafrost is melting, wetlands are changing, weather patterns are modifying, and who knows what other changes are in store for these migratory birds? One thing is certain, it won’t be good.
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. It’s been argued about, denied, and ignored. Two of the most difficult things in the current presidential campaign is getting candidates to address the issue, and getting journalists to challenge them to talk about what they would do about it as president. We simply can’t continue to go on as we’ve been doing. The challenge of global warming is unprecedented.
In the words of Abraham Lincoln, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”
We have to depend on what Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature,” and change our ways. To have the largest impact on atmospheric carbon, priority should be placed upon the largest sources. It will be necessary, for example, to take a close look at power generation, and to become much more conservative in our use of electricity. The same is true for the types of vehicles we drive and the amount of fuel we consume.
Our aim should be to restore a world in which mergansers will be able to continue to ignore us for millennia to come.
The United Nations negotiated at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 the ultimate aim: “….. to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations …at a level that would prevent dangerous interference with the climate system ….. within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.”