The Single Most Significant Event in History

Peter's Journal January 2007

The single most significant event in the history of the human race occurred in January of 2007; thus only one entry for the entire 31 days.

The names Kiribati and Lohachara have probably not come up during your dinner table conversation, however, they may become for this generation the indicator place leading to the same outcome as Easter Island. As we are well aware a thriving civilization disappeared, almost overnight, and all that was left on Easter Island were huge stone representations of their deity. Why the island population vanished remains in the realm of conjecture and speculation, but environmental destruction was the probable cause.

Islands in microcosm represent the Earth in macrocosm. We are an island in the vast expanse of interstellar space, but our fate may be like that fabled island in the pacific. Our fragile island home has just experienced the most catastrophic even in the history of the planet, and no one is even talking about it.
This is where Kiribati and Lohachara become important. The Pacific Atoll nation of Kiribati disappeared under the waves last year and few people noticed. Kiribati was un-inhabited and gained little attention except among the scientific community studying global warming.

January is another story altogether. An island nation of 10,000 people is uninhabitable now because the sea has taken Lohachara This small island, one among many at the point in the Bay of Bengal off India where the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers join, has gradually, almost imperceptivity been taken by the sea. This is a clear indication that the rising global waters are attacking land masses with a vengeance.

The old expression ‘you can’t turn back the tide’ is now having grave consequences as it is applied to low lying parts of the globe, often beginning with essentially inhabited sandbars, from the Egyptian delta to the Marshall Islands.

By implication the whole of the earth is beginning to drown. Water levels are rising, and there is no turning back the tide. The consequences are unthinkable. One little atoll gone is a remote part of the world, and only a brief sigh is heard. Granted relocating 10,000 people is not an insurmountable undertaking, but the predictions from the scientific community looking into the future anywhere from 20-50 years from now indicates that there may be 500 million environmental refugees within our children’s lifetime.

We know the culprit is sea level rise. Unstoppable as a result of melting ice, warming temperatures, and the human family burying its head in the sand as the waters rise around us all. Lohachara is gone. Who cares? Everyone better! Global warming has direct consequences on the earth’s fragile land needed to sustain life. The garden is disappearing, an island or two at a time.