A Sacred River Left In Peril By Global Warming

Source: Washington Post

A Sacred River Left in Peril by Global Warming
Glacier That Feeds Ganges Is Vanishing

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 17, 2007; Page A01

VARANASI, India -- With her eyes sealed, Ramedi cupped the murky water of the Ganges River in her hands, lifted them toward the sun, and prayed for her husband, her 15 grandchildren and her bad hip. She, like India's other 800 million Hindus, has absolute faith that the river she calls Ganga Ma can heal.

- snip -

But the prayer rituals carried out on the water's edge may not last forever -- or even another generation, according to scientists and meteorologists. The Himalayan source of Hinduism's holiest river, they say, is drying up.

In this 3,000-year-old city known as the Jerusalem of India for its intense religious devotion, climate change could throw into turmoil something many devout Hindus never thought possible: their most intimate religious traditions. The Gangotri glacier, which provides up to 70 percent of the water of the Ganges during the dry summer months, is shrinking at a rate of 40 yards a year, nearly twice as fast as two decades ago, scientists say.

"This may be the first place on Earth where global warming could hurt our very religion. We are becoming an endangered species of Hindus," said Veer Bhadra Mishra, an engineer and director of the Varanasi-based Sankat Mochan Foundation, an organization that advocates for the preservation of the Ganges. "The melting glaciers are a terrible thing. We have to ask ourselves, who are the custodians of our culture if we can't even help our beloved Ganga?"

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n/t

And, because you have such a great logon name, I will say this as well.

We can not afford to have a sacred river gap!

:thumbsup:

All of Nature is sacred but water is the life's blood of our Mother Earth and needed by all the life forms that she sustains.

"It is a fact that more and not less development is the best way for developing countries to address themselves to the issues of preserving the environment," Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a public statement before leaving for the G-8 summit in Germany. India is one of the world's top producers of greenhouse gas emissions...

x( Unless that "development" involves alternative and CLEAN energy sources, which I somehow doubt very much, then these idiots need some serious eye opening before it's too late. I suppose it would be way to much to hope for that, ala a Dickens's Christmas Carol, three Ghosts of Global Warming Past, Present and Future visit each of these anti-environmentalists and help them towards an epiphany like Scrooges.

:thumbsdown:

but also due to the vast amount of water used by factories in its rapid industrialization. Both China and India both effectively got themselves exempted from the Kyoto protocols because they are "developing."

:wtf:

stop the warming at this point. NOT this slow motion 'capitalist" mode we are going in.

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:eyes:

Sorry India, you can't blame America for everything wrong with the river.

Some very odd comments in this thread.