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SAVE OUR PLANET… Panamanian island dwellers prepare to leave ancestral homes. For the
indigenous Kuna people, who have lived for hundreds of years on islands in an archipelago
off Panama’s northwestern coast, the increasingly intense effects of climate change such as
stronger winds, storms and higher tides are now leaving them in ankle- or knee-deep water,
often for days on end. Their situation has also been made worse by the harvesting and
acidification of many offshore coral reefs, which previously provided protection. Sea
level rises of up to 59 centimeters have been forecast by the United Nations to occur by
century’s end. However, those calculations did not account for what is now known to be
the accelerated melting of vast ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. Thus, with the
prospect of conditions only worsening, some of the islands’ 32,000 people have begun
to prepare for a move to the Panamanian mainland. In other areas of the world, communities on
island nations such as Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Fiji have already had to relocate due
to rising sea level effects such as inundation of buildings and salt water contamination
of crops. Hector Guzman, a marine biologist specialist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research
Institute in Panama states, “This is no longer about a scientist saying that climate
change and the change in sea level will flood (a people) and affect them. This is happening
now in the real world.”
We send our prayers for the strength and resiliency of the Panamanian Kuna people at this difficult
time. May we all heed such warning signs from science and nature alike to act quickly in
sustainable ways and avert the loss of lands, cultures and lives.
Supreme Master Ching Hai has on several occasions spoken of the devastating effects of rising
sea levels and how to address this urgent matter, as during an October 2009 videoconference
in Indonesia.
Videoconference with Supreme Master Ching Hai
Jakarta, Indonesia – October 22, 2009
Supreme Master Ching Hai: The threats imposed by global warming are more than imminent;
they are already here, as you can see through many disasters, upheavals, climate refugees,
phenomena around the world. It’s the rising sea levels as well that force people to lose
their home, their ancestral home, to go begging elsewhere; losing also their dignity, losing
everything, not just physical possessions, but losing their loved ones as well.
We must change while there is still time So please, everyone, plant veg, be veg and
we can go green later when we’ve already saved the planet�