When my backyard is impacted, I'll change

Unabated, our contagious love affair with the car will congest us -- our roadways and our airways -- and heat up the global mercury.

Do we have to wait until the target of our infatuation floods our backyard?
Washes away the levies in our city?
Do we have to wait until the fields growing corn and soybeans for our next meal are struck by flood, drought, pestilence, pollution or lack of pollination?

Unfortunately, the answer to those questions is YES. We humans are so slow to change our habits, to believe the science of global warming, that we must have tangible evidence or shocking energy bills before we change.

The canary in the coal mine -- the elegant polar bear and their shrinking habitat -- are a long way off from our backyard.

There are potential extinctions in my own backyard that will impact my life.

1. Honey Bees. Have you heard of the Colony Collapse Disorder in which millions of bees simply fly away from their hives and the super-fields they are consigned to pollinate?

I don't have the skills or time to pollinate my next meal, and I appreciate bees for doing that work, thanklessly.

Without bees in my backyard, we could all be pretty hungry. Google Colony Collapse Disorder and learn more. It's even on the radar of the US Dept. of Agriculture, so it must be real.
Einstein said that without bees, humankind will last about four years.

2. Bats. Have you heard about a fungus that is threatening the extinction of bats? Again, I could never do for the earth what bats do -- consume 500 to 1500 mosquitoes an hour, quietly, mostly unseen.

I prefer bats to pesticides, which could be contributing toe the Colony Collapse disorder.

We're all interconnected in the web of life-- that should be a song or a book or a website. :-0

A few weeks ago, while researching material for a speech and interactive presentation on carpooling and bike commuting, I Googled "Species Loss."

The results, solid and unmovable at the top of the organic search, caused me to stop my normal multi-task attack of my daily to-do list.

http://www.well.com/~davidu/extinction.html, gave me cubicle paralysis.

Posted on the website are more than 100 scholarly articles proving climate change is impacting the Earth's biodiversity.

Read it and feel the fear, as I did. The following simple statement precedes the list of links to the articles:

"Human beings are currently causing the greatest mass extinction of species since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If present trends continue, one half of all species of life on earth will be extinct in less than 100 years, as a result of habitat destruction, pollution, invasive species, and climate change."

For a decade, Prof. David Ulansey, a Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, has diligently posted articles that prove climate change is creating the greatest mass extinction of species since the dinosaurs.

This sounds like the canary in the coal mine. If half of all species on Earth are doomed, who's to say humans won't fall with everything else.

Will we read the writing on the website and change our foolish ways?

Not In My Back Yard [NIMBY]

As long as Americans treat our autos like one of the family, we have little hope to reduce congestion and lower our carbon footprint.

At age 16 or thereabouts, we adopt or marry autos that reflect our personality, income and education. We name them, care for them and sometimes spend more per hour on parking them than we do on day care for children or old people.

We clean them, feed them with gas and take them to the mechanic more often than some of us visit our physicians for check-ups. The special rooms cars occupy in our homes are usually bigger than our bedrooms and living rooms. If we park them on the street, we worry about their safety and long for a garage.

After housing, most of us spend more on transportation than we do on any other line item in our household budget. The only category that can exceed transportation could be daycare for young children.

We view cars as essential, and build our societies around them. In the same way car ownership blossomed in the 20th century, pollution from cars may cause the demise of our society in the 21st century.

Car ownership in China is now 6 cars per 100 people -- the same rate as in the USA in 1920. Today, American car ownership is 90 percent. China is 20 percent of the world's population. They emulate America.

You do the math, while we can still see through the smog and congestion.

We are doomed if the people of Chindia fall in love with autos the way we Americans have.