Earth Equity News

The Way Things Look From the Top of the World. By Michael Gerson, Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 17, 2008. "North of Oslo, north of Longyearbyen, almost as north as North itself, the National Geographic Endeavor breaks pack ice in endless daylight through a gray-teal sea. The expedition has been cruising near Svalbard, a group of high arctic islands larger than Denmark… This desolate, grand, forgotten sea has suddenly come to the center of world attention for one reason… In the last 50 years as much as half of summer sea ice has gone missing… The challenge of replacing carbon in our economy is massive -- and many incompletely known factors, from ice dynamics to the flow of ocean currents, determine its urgency. Answers will require a politically difficult task: acting with uncertain risk. But as I stand near the top of the world on a desolate shore with whale skulls and ruins, the crude oil economy appears about as primitive and destructive as the whale oil economy now seems."