I think it was the winter of 1981- 82 when I first noticed that change was in the air. In 1984, my friend’s outdoor gear shop went under because cross country skis were their mainstay of business and the previous 3 winters it had been too warm to have much of a snowpack so no one was buying skis anymore. Another sign for me came in the winter of 1991 when a bus driver in the Netherlands was telling us his experience that over the previous decade it hadn’t snowed in Holland and it never got cold enough to skate on the canals anymore. And then in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s I started examining the loss of glaciers and permanent snowfields in the Wind River Range that I had photographed in the mid 1970’s. This experiment, which I still continue has been the most heart rending. Even though the ‘Winds’ contain 7 of the 10 largest glaciers in the lower 48, calculations made in 1998 predicted all but the largest, Fremont Glacier, would be gone by 2020.

Over the last few winters I have been keeping track of daily lows and finding that about 80% of the lows are 10-15 degrees above the 30 year average. SNOWTel sites throughout Wyoming, even on years of above average snowfall, are melting off 3 weeks ahead of the 1970-2000 average. This year is the melt-off started in mid February and really kicked in right at the beginning of March.

I can’t stuff these into the can of vagaries of the weather, I can only classify these as symptoms of an unsustainable world. We have been withdrawing from our natural capital account, as a species, for thousands of years but the size and pace of these withdrawals have exponentially increased by the factor of available energy as we moved from wood to coal to petroleum. This same increase in energy availability precipitated the same exponential curve of population growth. And just as the other 80% of the world’s population wants the same luxuries that the US (4% of the world’s population) has enjoyed by using 35% of the planet’s resources, nature seems to be starting to call in the debts. We are starting to see the symptoms of an unsustainable world.

Every aspect of the human world and its source, the natural world, is stretched to the breaking point. We, as a species, have built an empire on a specious philosophical foundation which failed to take basic physics or the innate interconnectedness of all systems into account. We have built a civilization of cards by externalizing the “costs” of doing business under this baseless philosophy. Yes, it is true that this philosophy has provided many treasures and worked miraculously as long as we could keep rolling over the mortgage and never having to make any payments. But now we are faced with the undeniable symptoms of an unsustainable world.

What we who work hard each day to protect and restore the natural world deal with are the symptoms of an unsustainable world created from the foundation of a bogus and short-sighted philosophy. Be they the loss of the productivity of the land, degradation of riparian systems, loss of biodiversity, subsidies propping up unsustainable activities, policies that reward the externalizing of costs or global warming, all these and many more are just symptoms of an unsustainable world.

Albert Einstein is said to have written “You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.” We cannot build a sustainable world by tweaking the current foundation. Creating a sustainable world requires that we create an entirely new framework on which to base our civilization. Can we make the leap is the question of this millennia.

Jonathan Ratner is Wyoming director of WWP. He lives near Dubois, Wyoming.