Ice Age, glaciers & ice caps

A couple of weeks ago, my husband saw a special on Discovery Channel about a group of scientists who had been studying glaciers in the North Pole. Part of the study was a comparison of the position and appearance of the glaciers decades ago with their location and condition today. My husband said it was amazing how much they have changed, and how scary too because the melting ice caps can inundate large portions of the earth. I agreed on both points. But I also mentioned that melting ice caps and the movement of glaciers can also mean that parts of the world that had been inhabitable for thousands of years might finally become habitable and that’s not necessarily bad.

Two days ago, reports came out about James Cook University researchers’ conclusion that the tropics had widened by up to 500 kilometers in the past 25 years (see “Climate change altering tropics,” Manila Standard Today, July 7 2009). Melting ice caps, creeping glaciers and widening tropics – yes, the face of the earth is changing.

The thing is, the world has always been changing. Humans adapted in order to survive. And this ability to adapt for survival’s sake has always been true of all species that ever lived. Species that couldn’t adapt became extinct. Once upon a time, there were dinosaurs and they perished. Once upon a time, only the seas were habited until marine creatures evolved and developed the ability to survive on land. A long time ago, men lived in caves, they discovered fire and stone and metal, and their way of living changed. They ate animals they hunted and picked fruits and leaves and, in the process of living, continually changed the ecological balance of the earth.

What bugs me about many of today’s scientific studies on the earth and the environment is how very few of them give us an idea about how to survive the change. Most are focused on preventing change by scaring the bejesus out of us with words like global warming and greenhouse effects. But these changes are consequences of living. Science was just too backward to document the changes up until the past few decades. And because scientists today can’t compare the changes during the last decades with changes that took place over a similar period thousands of years ago, they’re making it out as though the changes are only taking place during our generation. But do they really know that?

Ice Age isn’t just the title of an animated film and its sequels. There are some scientists, in fact, who say that we are are still living in a partial Ice Age because ice sheets still exist. It just seems scary today because scientific progress allows us to monitor the change and media help disseminate the findings. But ice caps and continental caps have been melting and glaciers crawling for thousands and thousands of years. Do you really think that during the Stone Age (Ice Age falls within the Mesolithic Period, the second stage of the Stone Age), people wasted their time monitoring glacial movement for science’s sake?

Sure, the primitive man must have watched the seasonal changes to predict what animals could be hunted and what fruits could be gathered during each season. But when the face of the earth changed and an area became inhabitable they simply moved on in search of more hospitable habitats where food was more plentiful and living conditions were not as harsh. That was how communities grew. That was how civilizations were born. Men left places where survival was difficult and settled in areas where they could live all year round, year after year.

It is us that need to adapt. Scientists play god when they relay the message that we and we alone can control how the earth will behave. Science makes man out as someone more powerful than he really is. How typically human! But that, I think, is where the key to the puzzle lies.

Despite all the noble-sounding intentions, all these scary “truths” about how much the earth has changed is not so much about trying to save it out of love for the only home that humans will ever know, but merely to save it in the form that allows the human specie to exist and thrive. It’s a fear for our own mortality. We don’t want the earth to change because it might turn out into something where humans, as we are today, can no longer survive.

Ironic, really. Science is supposed to represent progress and here it is trying to stop change by telling us we can prevent nature from taking its course. More and more everyday, science moves closer to the realm of religion, instilling fear in us that unless we do as it says, we are doomed.

But we cannot tell the earth what to do. We cannot calendar when volcanoes will erupt nor when tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes will occur. We cannot dictate when the ocean floors should shift, the glaciers move and the ice caps melt. We can only adapt by moving away from their paths.

The earth is a living, breathing earth that has existed far longer than the human race and it will be there long after the human race, as we know it today, becomes extinct. And it will continue to change despite us. It has played host to every specie that had been strong enough to adapt and survive. And it will go on doing so and serve as home to new species yet to be born including, perhaps, a new breed of humans strong enough to live through the changes.