1st December 2022
Kinship of all creation: we are all interconnected, dependant upon each other, bound into a finely wrought ecosystem that abounds in beauty. Pray that the interests of all our kindred will be valued and protected.
Climate change is affecting all parts of the world, from the Artic southwards. it affects people, plants and creatures alike.
Reindeer numbers across the Arctic have fallen by more than half in the past two decades. They survive by migrating to find food, using their hooves to dig through the snow to eat the nutritious lichen buried underneath. But climate change means herds must swim across previously frozen rivers and many young calves drown – and rising temperatures mean more rain, covering plants with ice instead of snow, making grazing harder.
https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/11-arctic-species-affected-climate-change
://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/11-arctic-species-affected-climate-chang
And from The Guardian: 30 Oct 2021, Gennadiy Shukin Taymyr, north Russia
I was born in 1962 in a family of deer herders in Taymyr, on a peninsula in the very far north of Russia. I am part of the Dolgan community: we are an indigenous Russian group and there are about 6,000 left of us living in the tundra.
Growing up, the Soviet Union tried to deny us our traditional way of life, but since then climate change has become the biggest challenge to our survival. Our community lives by hunting, fishing and herding deer. Scientists say that Taymyr has the most rapid temperature increase in Russia, and we can really feel it.
Because of the warmer winters, we have seen that deer are giving birth earlier in the year. Many are born too weak and don’t survive the long journeys they have to make. This means there is much less deer for us to hunt and it hurts the whole ecosystem.
Rivers and lakes that we use for fishing have also started to dry out. Others are too polluted after all the big oil and gas plants have sprung up over the years in our lands. Some days we don’t catch any fish at all.
For generations, we have sold the food we caught to local towns and cities to buy basic products like sugar and wheat. Without animals, we cannot survive.
Big craters are also forming because the Arctic permafrost is starting to melt under our feet. This means the routes that we have used for decades to travel, hunt and fish have to be adjusted as whole roads have sunk. It is also dangerous as you never know where the next crater will form.
Our ecosystem is changing quickly: animals like sables that I have never seen before in my life have appeared in the tundra. And now we also have to deal with giant mosquitoes and bugs that attack our livestock. The summers are becoming unbearable. It’s madness.
The young people see that climate change is making our traditional way of life impossible and they are forced to move to the bigger cities to find jobs, which are often low-paid. Our culture is disappearing.
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-guardian-supplement/20211030/281732682701562
The Green Tau 