Our Research group New England Canadian Provinces Alliance: hydrodamtruth.org
Although our focus has been on "climate change" and the importance of the Arctic regions influence on the global climate, we look to advance a deeper understanding of this planet Earth we are all trying to live with. We thought that you and you readers could appreciate the below article we recently had published.
Our Planet: Person or Living Being
Earth, could it be a living being that we have overlooked
cliff Krolick
Our Planet: Person or Living Entity?
Lately it’s fashionable to think of this planet we share as having Environmental Personhood and afforded status equal to a living person and entitled to Environmental Justice.
It’s time to consider our Earth as a living, breathing being possessing systems that keep it running smoothly and healthily. We’re now have to face the fact that the temperature of the planet is increasing and as in other living beings this signals that something is happening out of the “normal functioning range”.
People call this warming climate change. But we could say, the earth has a fever, and it’s not going down.
When we humans have a prolonged fever we see a doctor. We test our fluids, our breathing, our blood pressure and our blood for toxic and nutritional levels.
Our cardiovascular system, heart, arteries, veins and capillaries supply us with nutrients, circulate oxygen from our lungs, and cleanse our kidneys and liver: in short, keep us alive.
It follows that our Earth, as a living, breathing being, appears to have similar cardiovascular system in play; a system that is not functioning within “normal range”.
If we assume the Earth has a cardiovascular system of sorts, we can think of the oceans as its heart, large rivers its arteries, smaller rivers and streams, wetlands and bogs its veins and capillaries sending nutrients to its extremities and to the heart. We can think of the atmosphere as its’ lungs, all those GHGs we routinely put into it. There’s also a terrestrial form, like a body that provides sustenance and housing to land life. Land and waters are have been intertwined for eons of time supporting nutritional health. Land loving creatures receive directly from the land or catch fish from waters. However, health of aquatic species is mainly delivered and connected to major waterways(rivers) which make deliveries of food, key elements, and nutrients for survival of water creatures. But those avenues-rivers of support are more and more clogged, similar to cardiovascular disease in humans, by large hydroelectric dams: mega-dams.
Large or Mega-dams and their sea-size impoundment reservoirs are the clots in the world’s circulatory system, hoarding much of the nutrients, stuck behind the dams. So why imprison so much water and nutrient material. It seems that generating and selling hydroelectricity is very profitable. Are profits made, worth the cost of destroying marine life ? Maybe destroying life on Earth?
The damming of rivers is one of mankind’s most significant modifications impacting the flow of water and associated materials from land to sea. Included in these materials are nutritional elements like nitrogen and phosphorus, calcium carbonate and silicon required by all life on Earth. As a matter of fact, some of the smallest microscopic organisms called diatoms a form of algae account for the largest fraction of biological productivity of the oceans. Their main function is to eat, capture,carbon dioxide and convert it to oxygen, sounds familiar?
Diatoms sequester more Co2 than all the rainforests of the planet But according to NASA studies these floating diatomic Plankton, commonly known as Phytoplankton, their populations are decreasing 1% per year, mainly from lack of available nutrients
Maavara, T., Akbarzadeh, Z.,& Van Cappellen, P. (2020). Global dam‐driven changes to riverine N:P:Si ratios delivered to the coastal ocean. Geophysical Research Letters, 47, e2020GL088288.
Many of the larger rivers up until the early to mid 19th century had been functioning normally. Rivers were the main nutritional delivery system for the smallest microscopic living things: the smallest, diatoms (plankton), feed the largest of Marine Mammals the Blue Whale, in a continuous stream of regeneration.
The estuaries, bays, and Continental Shelf flooded each spring during ice out from rivers and stormy periods providing waters with rich nutritional sediments from erosion off the land. Through the late 1950s into the 1980s many of the major rivers and waterways that emptied into the Northern Hemisphere oceans had large dams constructed permanently obstructing the natural flows containing much of the nutritional requirements of marine life.
This obstruction and impoundment cuts off much of the nutritional food supplies to all marine life . Stockpiling this nutrition deep behind dams decomposes emitting methane which accelerates global warming. Clearly these many river alterations is way out of the historical normal range, an the planet’s coronary arteries, providing optimal health, are compromised.
Like cardiovascular disease in humans the deprivation of this ‘blood supply’ results in the starvation of aquatic life and the decline of livable habitat.
Unfortunately the earth does not have a primary care physician who would recommend surgery to remove the blockages freeing up the blood supply to allow the patient to recover.
It is up to us, the tenant stewards, to take the helm and choose not to invest in damming up its cardiovascular system. We need to live with, not on, the earth and allow it to recover from our antiquated energy generation practices that are doing what may be irreparable harm.
Divest from mega-dams. Remove the blockages that are continuing to damage our climate by preventing nutritional flow, thawing the permafrost and destroying habitats for all living things, land and sea.
Allow the Earth to heal itself by returning the natural flow of water, the planet’s life blood, with all its beneficial value. Let the rivers run free again.
Many thanks for an excellent summary!
Our Research group New England Canadian Provinces Alliance: hydrodamtruth.org
Although our focus has been on "climate change" and the importance of the Arctic regions influence on the global climate, we look to advance a deeper understanding of this planet Earth we are all trying to live with. We thought that you and you readers could appreciate the below article we recently had published.
Our Planet: Person or Living Being
Earth, could it be a living being that we have overlooked
cliff Krolick
Our Planet: Person or Living Entity?
Lately it’s fashionable to think of this planet we share as having Environmental Personhood and afforded status equal to a living person and entitled to Environmental Justice.
It’s time to consider our Earth as a living, breathing being possessing systems that keep it running smoothly and healthily. We’re now have to face the fact that the temperature of the planet is increasing and as in other living beings this signals that something is happening out of the “normal functioning range”.
People call this warming climate change. But we could say, the earth has a fever, and it’s not going down.
When we humans have a prolonged fever we see a doctor. We test our fluids, our breathing, our blood pressure and our blood for toxic and nutritional levels.
Our cardiovascular system, heart, arteries, veins and capillaries supply us with nutrients, circulate oxygen from our lungs, and cleanse our kidneys and liver: in short, keep us alive.
It follows that our Earth, as a living, breathing being, appears to have similar cardiovascular system in play; a system that is not functioning within “normal range”.
If we assume the Earth has a cardiovascular system of sorts, we can think of the oceans as its heart, large rivers its arteries, smaller rivers and streams, wetlands and bogs its veins and capillaries sending nutrients to its extremities and to the heart. We can think of the atmosphere as its’ lungs, all those GHGs we routinely put into it. There’s also a terrestrial form, like a body that provides sustenance and housing to land life. Land and waters are have been intertwined for eons of time supporting nutritional health. Land loving creatures receive directly from the land or catch fish from waters. However, health of aquatic species is mainly delivered and connected to major waterways(rivers) which make deliveries of food, key elements, and nutrients for survival of water creatures. But those avenues-rivers of support are more and more clogged, similar to cardiovascular disease in humans, by large hydroelectric dams: mega-dams.
Large or Mega-dams and their sea-size impoundment reservoirs are the clots in the world’s circulatory system, hoarding much of the nutrients, stuck behind the dams. So why imprison so much water and nutrient material. It seems that generating and selling hydroelectricity is very profitable. Are profits made, worth the cost of destroying marine life ? Maybe destroying life on Earth?
The damming of rivers is one of mankind’s most significant modifications impacting the flow of water and associated materials from land to sea. Included in these materials are nutritional elements like nitrogen and phosphorus, calcium carbonate and silicon required by all life on Earth. As a matter of fact, some of the smallest microscopic organisms called diatoms a form of algae account for the largest fraction of biological productivity of the oceans. Their main function is to eat, capture,carbon dioxide and convert it to oxygen, sounds familiar?
Diatoms sequester more Co2 than all the rainforests of the planet But according to NASA studies these floating diatomic Plankton, commonly known as Phytoplankton, their populations are decreasing 1% per year, mainly from lack of available nutrients
Maavara, T., Akbarzadeh, Z.,& Van Cappellen, P. (2020). Global dam‐driven changes to riverine N:P:Si ratios delivered to the coastal ocean. Geophysical Research Letters, 47, e2020GL088288.
https://doi.org/
10.1029/2020GL088288
Many of the larger rivers up until the early to mid 19th century had been functioning normally. Rivers were the main nutritional delivery system for the smallest microscopic living things: the smallest, diatoms (plankton), feed the largest of Marine Mammals the Blue Whale, in a continuous stream of regeneration.
The estuaries, bays, and Continental Shelf flooded each spring during ice out from rivers and stormy periods providing waters with rich nutritional sediments from erosion off the land. Through the late 1950s into the 1980s many of the major rivers and waterways that emptied into the Northern Hemisphere oceans had large dams constructed permanently obstructing the natural flows containing much of the nutritional requirements of marine life.
This obstruction and impoundment cuts off much of the nutritional food supplies to all marine life . Stockpiling this nutrition deep behind dams decomposes emitting methane which accelerates global warming. Clearly these many river alterations is way out of the historical normal range, an the planet’s coronary arteries, providing optimal health, are compromised.
Like cardiovascular disease in humans the deprivation of this ‘blood supply’ results in the starvation of aquatic life and the decline of livable habitat.
Unfortunately the earth does not have a primary care physician who would recommend surgery to remove the blockages freeing up the blood supply to allow the patient to recover.
It is up to us, the tenant stewards, to take the helm and choose not to invest in damming up its cardiovascular system. We need to live with, not on, the earth and allow it to recover from our antiquated energy generation practices that are doing what may be irreparable harm.
Divest from mega-dams. Remove the blockages that are continuing to damage our climate by preventing nutritional flow, thawing the permafrost and destroying habitats for all living things, land and sea.
Allow the Earth to heal itself by returning the natural flow of water, the planet’s life blood, with all its beneficial value. Let the rivers run free again.