The Hundred Mile Challenge - a side bar on climate change

The recent trip to Edmonton and through the ice fields of the Canadian Rockies brought me face to face with an issue that affects us all - climate change and our individual responsibility for the effects of our personal behavior on the world in which we live.  The last time I drove that route was thirty four ago.  My children were ten and twelve and we stopped at the Columbia Ice Fields and walked to the foot of the Athabaska Glacier.  During this recent trip the glacier was much changed.  Where a narrow path once wound down from the main road there is now about a kilometer of paved road down to a parking lot.  A further hike takes today's tourist up and over the moraine, once covered in ice and to the foot of the receding glacier.  Markers indicate the fast retreat of the ice and predictions are that, in my grand-children's lifetime this glacier will be gone.  The Athabaska Glacier is the source of three major waterways; the Athabaska River, the Saskatchewan River and the mighty Columbia.  The ice fields are also the source of the Thompson River and the lush, fertile valley through which we had just driven.  The thought that, within the next one hundred years all of this would be gone is terrifying; not just because of the loss of habitat for wild life but also the reality of reduced food production and life sustaining water supplies for the growing communities along that route.

Athabaske Glacier 1979

 

The Athabaska Glacier today. 
The ice has receded over the first moraine and is half way over the second moraine.

For the effects of climate change on our ice from the scientists perspective, check out this article.  We are not discussing these issues and yet Canada is home to some of the worlds largest ice fields and we have a responsibility to protect them. Instead we are focused on the extraction of more of the fuel that is creating the crisis.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4084c8ee-fa36-11e2-98e0-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2av9RLdmw

I became sadly aware of our own contribution to the problem as we joined our fellow travelers, each in their own vehicles burning up he fossil fuel as we drove through these beautiful places while we listened to the debate on the radio about the building of longer pipelines to transport more fossil fuels across the country.  And I had also chosen to take my wool some one thousand kilometers to the mill when there is a perfectly good mill within a two hour car ride from here.  Expediency and impatience fueled that decision.  The Carstairs mill is better able to handle the volume in a timely way.  Taking the hundred mile challenge and having my wool processed locally might mean some inconvenience in waiting for the final product, but what a price our grand-children will pay for my  current need for immediate gratification.

Which brings me back to our passion for wool.  I have never quite understood the fascination of fellow spinners for seeking out fleece and fiber from the other side of the world.  While Australian merino wool and English Cotswold fleece are wonderful to work with, I have little interest in using the over processed tops of yarn provided to spinners when I have no relationship with the sheep that produced this fiber.  My ancestors did not have the luxury of such finely prepared fibers.  Indeed, my mother plucked fleece off the barbed wire in the field beside her house for her first project.  We need to ask ourselves how we can fulfill our passion while using local fiber.  After all, we share our environment with the animals who live around us.  While our governments have a global responsibility for setting policies to protect our most valuable asset which is water, we need to ask ourselves what we can do to help, one person at a time.