Waking Slow

End o' the year, folks. Time to take stock. You know that whole John Lennon/So This is Christmas, What Have We Done bit?

A headline in the Guardian declares this "the year the world woke up" to climate change. I hope that's correct, but I can't help but think of Theodore Roethke's poem -- the one that goes, "I wake to sleep / and take my waking slow." It seems to me we've been awfully slow to rouse from slumber.

We need to rise and shine if we hope to pass along a livable world to future generations. I know that still sounds like Chicken Little hysteria in some (increasingly lonely) corners, but so be it. For the record, I sincerely hope they -- the dogged skeptics and blind optimists -- are right and the rest of us are wrong, but things sure don't look good.

The world is changing at a frightening clip, and the evidence of that is everywhere. The North Pole will soon be ice-free in summer, say scientists, and equally ominous signs have been observed across Africa and Australia's wheat belt and the Alps and just about everywhere else you can think of. (Yeah, I know, that's why they call it global warming.)

The animal kingdom is sending us signals as well, responding to climate change in marked and myriad ways. Just today, for example, I read that the bears in the Cantabrian mountains of Spain have stopped hibernating. And the BBC recently ran a special about the upward migration of many mountain species, some of which, like the Gelada Baboons of the Ethiopian Highlands (pictured), are literally running out of room.

Any one such phenomenon could be brushed off as insignificant, but the pattern is harder to deny. The list of observed animal migrations and changing plant ranges could go on for paragraphs if not pages. But perhaps the most alarming change being witnessed is a marked slow-down in phytoplankton production tied to rising ocean temperatures.

So, ... it's almost 2007 and we're finally waking to all this and it's a bit like waking up to a nightmare. It's understandable that we'd rather go back to sleep and dream happier dreams. But that would be a mistake. We've got to knuckle down, get to work, put our noses to the grindstone (and every other locker-room cliche you can think of) if we're to get through this. And I think we will. And anyway, we've got to try, even if it means groping our way through the darkness. As Roethke says in his poem: "I learn by going where I have to go."

Whatever the hell it was he meant by that.

'Til next year, adios.