SAVE OUR PLANET… Polar bears dying from climate change-related ice melt. A recent
video recorded in Hudson Bay, Canada, showed a mother polar bear and her pair of cubs searching
for food with one of the cubs observed to experience seizures and both sadly perishing
within two days of the filming. Global warming is thought to be the cause of these and other
polar bear fatalities as accelerated sea ice melt diminishes both the space and time for
the bears to rest and to feed themselves. Climate change in the western Hudson Bay alone
has been noted to cause melting of ice three weeks earlier than 30 years ago, while the
freezing is now also delayed by several weeks.
In addition, a recent study by the World Wildlife Fund showed that for the past several years,
the bears and sometimes their cubs have been forced to swim up to 650 kilometers at a time
as their ice habitats disappear. The young ones are especially at risk because they are
not yet able to adjust to the cold. In fact, between 1987 and 2004, the population of polar
bears in the Hudson Bay area declined by 22%, with forecasts from the US government of their
complete extinction by 2050 in some areas. Kassie Siegel, director of US research group
Center for Biological Diversity, said, “Global warming isn’t a crisis that’s decades
away. It’s here now. The sad truth is that polar bears are already starving as global
warming melts the Arctic.”
We thank World Wildlife Fund, Center for Biological Diversity and all others for your efforts
to raise awareness about the tragic predicament facing the polar bears. May we act swiftly
to co-exist in harmony with nature for the safeguarding of all life on our planet. Expressing
her concern for all beings, Supreme Master Ching Hai during an October 2009 videoconference
in Indonesia emphasized the need for urgent actions to reverse the consequences of climate
change for all Earth’s inhabitants.
Videoconference with Supreme Master Ching Hai
Jarkata, Indonesia, October 22, 2009
Supreme Master Ching Hai: Now, according to expert scientists, the atmospheric temperatures
are rising so steeply that we do not have much time left to change. We have to halt
the meat consumption and the livestock raising. The greenhouse gases released from the animals,
from their waste, agricultural runoff, and the activities related to these massive operations
have been identified as the primary, the number one, cause of global warming. As the harmful
emissions of these animal raising operation cause atmospheric temperatures to get hotter
around the world, especially at the Arctic, the destructive effects are too many to count.
They include disturbances to birds’ migration patterns; homelessness of Arctic animals,
such as seals and penguins and polar bears, because the ice is nearly gone.
So please, everyone, plant veg, be veg and we can go green later when we’ve already
saved the planet. Save our planet, please.�