by John Matthews, WWF-US
When I was in graduate school, I spent a lot of time reading mostly abstract scientific papers about how the world’s climate was shifting. My time in the field was spent measuring how changes in rainfall and air temperatures have been affecting dragonflies. I began to feel very worried about how even small shifts in our climate were going to affect a lot of freshwater species.
Two years ago, I was hired by WWF to help colleagues around the world think through the problems that climate change was making for people and wild species all over the world. In my second week with WWF, a colleague called: Can you be in New Delhi in ten days? Within a few hours of landing we went to a national park that was a wetland recognized for its international importance. To my horror, I couldn’t see any water. Large trees were growing in the parched soil. I thought, I have nothing to say that’s useful here. There are no aquatic ecosystems left in this place. My Indian colleagues took us all a few miles upstream to a bridge, overlooking a dry riverbed full of grazing sheep.
Ashes await the return of the river (c)John Matthews/WWF-US
Here I saw the cremation sites of people who had brought their relative’s remains from far away, so that their ashes could wash downstream to the sacred Ganges of northern India. But there had been no water here for five years. There were only ashes.
I was so horrified at myself, so suddenly aware that my experience in North America had led me to view species and ecosystems as something wild and separate from myself. I felt quite suddenly aware that my species was managing freshwater ecosystems in ways that combined with the effects of climate change to cause really serious negative impacts to people and those ecosystems. The people who lived near this river needed it back, and they needed it to be healthy. And quite literally they needed it for their spirit. I thought, we have to get better, and we have to get better together: people, species, ecosystems.
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