World Environment Day

12:20pm Thursday 7th June 2007

Every year the United Nations marks the World Environment Day on 5 June. It is celebrated in over a hundred countries and aims to raise awareness about environmental issues and inspire people to take action. Each year, one country is selected to host the main international events. This year it is Norway and the theme is ‘Melting Ice – A Hot Topic’.
Ice is melting everywhere - and at an accelerating rate. Rising global temperatures are lengthening melting seasons, thawing frozen ground, and thinning ice caps and glaciers that have existed for millennia. These changes are raising sea levels faster than scientists predicted threatening both human and wildlife populations.
Since the industrial revolution, human activity has released ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases into the atmosphere, leading to gradual but unmistakable changes in climate throughout the world, especially at the higher latitudes. Average surface temperatures in the Arctic Circle have risen by more than half a degree Celsius per decade since 1981.
Climate change is teaching us something that we have forgotten – that everything is interconnected and interdependent (I&I). If we create unnatural stuff, or natural stuff in unnatural proportions, there are consequences. For years professors and campaigners have tried to point this out with their facts and figures with little success – but when nature herself started to teach the I & I lesson it didn’t take her long to get our attention. As an educator I have to admire her abilities.
So now it seems that quite a lot of people are ‘bothered’ by the current situation and the new leadership is coming from below. It can be found in the conversations that flow between individuals and the authentic actions they are taking. The new leadership is creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, which given time will breakthrough the most solid monuments of man’s greed and pride.
In recognition of World Environment Day the Herefordshire Times has produced a special supplement – ‘Green Times’. Please read it.

Professor Shirley Ali Khan