Given what passes for a good script in Hollywood these days, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a leak of one of next summer’s blockbusters:
Some Russian scientists studying nature in the Arctic are being sieged by 10 hungry polar bears, fighting for their lives amid dwindling supplies and grim prospects of help from the outside.
But this isn’t Hollywood. It’s happening right now. And it may take up to a month to rescue them.
The polar bears shouldn’t even be there, but thanks to global warming, their migration patterns are out of whack and they can’t find food. The scientists represent a veritable shed full of it. (Granted, the scientists also have a gun, so they’re not without protection.)
What this really underscores is that even in the farthest regions of our planet, global warming is negatively impacting ecosystems and the animals that live there. In just the past 25 years alone, we’ve obliterated 10 percent of the world’s forests. Humans have walked the earth for a mere soupçon of the time it’s been spinning, and yet we’re helping cause one the largest mass extinctions in the planet’s 4.5 billion year history.
Diversity breeds resilience — an axiom as true in the workplace as it is the natural world. We might not think that losing an owl here and a mouse there is a big deal. But these small things have a ripple effect in the food chain. And eventually, we’ll be the ones roaming in for food on some barren stretch of post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Stop us if you’ve seen that movie before.
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