Today a CNN.com/travel story outlines 5 places to visit before climate change ruins them. http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/02/17/global.warming.travel/index.html
CNN's John Sutter gets the list from Bob Henson, author of "The Rough Guide to Climate Change" and a writer at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. The top five choices are the Great Barrier Reef (coral reefs worldwide are bleaching); the city of New Orleans (coastal cities are in danger of more and more flooding as glaciers melt); Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park (where hordes of pine beetles are eating away at the forests because they are no longer kept in check by winter cold-snaps); Alpine Glaciers in Switzerland (beautiful-to-see glaciers around the world are melting and disappearing); Brazil's Amazon rainforests ( it is possible that, once tropical forests are chopped down, the micro-climate will change permanently - perhaps drying or heating up - preventing the forests from ever growing back).
I don't think this list was meant to be exhaustive, by any means, but we need to add to this list the beautiful Appalachian Mountains. The Appalachian forests and habitats will be subject to the same climate-induced pressures as other forests (such as pests like the pine beetle), but the forests and streams don't stand a chance against mountaintop removal - the practice of obliterating entire mountains to get at every last bit of carbon/coal stored within them. All in the name of feeding our addiction (or the energy industry's addiction) to coal, and contributing further to climate change while we're at it.
Thank goodness EPA is moving (albeit slowly for my tastes!) to overturn Bush policies prohibiting controls on climate pollution - i.e. carbon emmissions. See Eileen's post at Article XI.com http://www.articlexi.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=135
And thanks to the efforts of groups like I Love Mountains, Appalachian Voices, CCAN, and many others, hopefully the policies that promote the decimation of our mountains will be changed - and quickly.
In the meantime, check out this impassioned testimony (December 11, 2008) by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. before the Congress, describing the wonder of the Appalachian Mountains - home to the "mother forest of all of North America" - and what we are destroying when we allow mountaintop removal to continue. He also reflects (just after 4:50 of the clip) on a conversation he had (at age 14) with his father, who told him that strip mining in Appalachia is "permanently impoverishing these communities because there is no way that they will ever be able to regenerate an economy from these barren moonscapes that are left behind." If this doesn't make us all want to rush out and visit and protect our mountains, I don't know what will! (Start at 3 minutes into the video if you are pressed for time...)
Blue Virginia
