South Sawyer

This year I was again working in AK doing the ecotour gig on a small ship (60 guests) on the day of the Earth Exchange. It was impossible to undertake the suggested ceremony, so I created a different one. On the 21st, I gave a slide illustrated talk entitled, “Discovering Sustainability: Facts, Stories and Dubious Moments”. I went through the first 3 of the 5 steps you suggest for the exchange. 1: I spoke of the entire earth as a wounded place where the human species is abnormal by 2 to 4 orders of magnitude in the 31 attributes of the earth ecosystem that we have been able to measure. Essentially, humans are a disease from the ecosystem perspective. 2: I shared stories of my life in studying and observing animals and ecosystems all over the planet for the past 44 years, including both polar regions, the tropics and the temperate world and how I fell in love with it all, the human and the other-than-human, along the way. : I concluded the talk with some data about our levels of consumption, our huge overpopulation and our impact on the planet, invited guests to join me in conversation and then encouraged them to carry on this conversation while here in AK and to take it home with them and become ambassadors for our wounded world. The conversations afterward were not necessarily easy but very rich! We spent some time on the 21st at the head of the South Sawyer Glacier, Tracey Arm AK, which is retreating 6’-7’ per day and calving huge amounts of ice into the fjord. I have attached a picture. Thank you for all you put into this Trebbe…it’s huge and important.