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Good Friday Friday April 6, 2007 by H.K. Ignatius, Global Concerns
The story of Christ's resurrection and return from the cave is more than a story about a mortal man who is also our holy savior; it is the story of the turning of the seasons and the eternal rotation of the Earth. Jesus' rebirth is also the rebirth of crops - hence its placement at the beginning of Spring. As He returned from the darkness of death, so we too can be delivered from the harshness of winter, and as He redeemed us from our sins, so we too can find redemption from the unforgiving cold.
Today is Good Friday, or the day that Christ entered the darkness, and on this day all the world is facing the possibility that the sacred cycle of seasons is coming to a stumbling and awkward anti-climax. Global warming - which everyone who is at all invested in reality accepts as fact - is nailing the Winter to a cross. It is an unprecedented crisis worthy of Revelations, and our redemption at the end of the story is far from guaranteed.
Today the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report on global warming so definitive and so inarguable that no person can ethically ignore it. You can read about it here: All Washed Up
Halting global warming is the supreme challenge of our generation. I think we can all appreciate this on some intellectual level but it is very difficult to incorporate that understanding into our daily lives. We live where we live and we work where we work - getting between them takes fossil fuel and there's nothing we can do about that. The prospect of global climate change is also so enormous and threatening as to be nearly incomprehensible, so for the most part we don't allow the thought to enter our conscious mind because living with that intangible fear could be crippling.
Fortunately, there is a lot that we can do to right this ship. I won't go on with a laundry list; let me tell you what I did today.
Today I bought a carbon offset. A carbon offset is an investment in a renewable energy or forest-restoration project that will create carbon absorption equivalent to what you produce in a year. What that means to me is that for the year 2007 I will be carbon-neutral; my presence on this planet will not mean a net increase in greenhouse gasses. Even better, it cost a mere $42 to achieve.
I think this is pretty great. I would like to encourage you to look into buying an offset for yourself. I got mine from American Forests (www.americanforests.org), who also has an online calculator to help you estimate your yearly carbon output. But there are lots of great projects out there; when the Oscars went carbon-neutral, they used the Bonneville Environmental Foundation (www.b-e-f.org), which is a renewable energy project.
Thanks for reading this all the way to the end. We have two choices for the future: we can continue to plummet down the path of unsustainability or we tap into humanity's amazing capacity for innovation and build the world we deserve. The question is: are we walking into the cave or out of it? I believe that if we all do what we can, there can be redemption at the end of this story. _____________
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