The other day I cycled down Old Oak Court in New West Lawrence but didn’t find the old oak. I didn’t find the woods on Woodland, Wildwood or Woodridge streets. The grove behind Grove Drive has long been a few trees lining an urban water drainage. And Riverview hasn’t had a view of the river for 30 years.

We live happily on geographic spin, pretending that Woodland isn’t really Lawnland, that the old oaks, the grove and the wildwoods are somehow still part of the neighborhood. It’s revealing that we name streets for what is gone, perhaps confirming art historian Simon Scharma’s insight that “landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.”

Sentimentalists would agree. Old Oak, Grove and Woodland pay homage to the oaks, grove and woodlands mowed down for homes, lawns and pavement. Hogwash, say cynics. The street names are calculated pretensions to rural chic, the sad suburban delusion of country life.

Whether homage or hogwash, names on maps relate our environmental history. Greenland, once a misnomer, will soon be green, losing its thick white sheets of shimmering ice to global warming. Iceland is becoming a misnomer for the same reason. So too Glacier National Park, whose famous glacier is more than half gone. If names on new maps record political change – USSR is out, Russia is in – they should also chart environmental change: Glacierless National Park; Icefreeland.

Many of the names will change as ice melt, rising oceans and drastically altered weather patterns will determine our environmental history and redraw our maps. The Gulf of Mexico will become the Gulf of St. Louis. San Francisco by the Bay will become San Francisco under the Bay. Much of the Arctic ice might be gone by the end of the century, turning the frozen north into the soggy north.

Most worrisome is the retreat of the ice sheets over the Arctic Ocean (the amount the ice shrank last year was the most in 100 years). The Arctic ice appears to be thawing from a one-two punch of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and ozone, which is generated by polluted cities and industrial sources in the Northern Hemisphere. During the dark Arctic winter, the lack of sunlight prevents the chemical breakdown of ozone in the Arctic atmosphere.

If the Arctic ice is shrinking, so, finally, is the number of people who persist in seeing no evil and hearing no evil about global warming and our hand in it. The most recent study commissioned by the Bush administration says “case-closed” – global warming is real and grave. Satellite and thermometer measurements indicate that the Earth is heating up at the surface and in the lower atmosphere, as predicted by 20 different climate models. The culprit, whether we like it or not, is the greenhouse gases we produce. (The whole report is available at www.climatescience.gov.)

On the other side of the rising Atlantic, a global climate report commissioned by British Prime Minister Tony Blair warns of higher sea levels from massive melt of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. “Time is running out,” worries one of the report’s scientists. “The next generation may live on a planet with no ice caps in the summer months.” Start redrawing the maps.

U.S. hunters and anglers don’t need governmental reports to convince them of global warming. Ice fishermen say their favorite lakes are no longer freezing over in winter. Hunters report there is no longer enough snow in the late fall to track deer. In New Mexico, wildlife watchers are seeing white-wing doves wintering farther north and javelinas suddenly invading from the south and breaching Interstate 40. These outdoorsmen and women can’t be dismissed as left-wing tree huggers. In a nationwide poll, two-thirds of them identified themselves as Bush Republicans and half as evangelical Christians. They care about preserving the creation they revere.

They also know that the environment is indifferent to politics or religion, but not immune to how we treat it. What’s their answer to global warming and greenhouse gases? It’s common sense where we live: more fuel conservation, more fuel-efficient cars and trucks, and more research into renewable energy supplies. The answer isn’t new maps showing shrinking ice sheets, shrinking coastlines, or how far north we have to trek to encounter frozen lakes, snow and wintering white-wing doves. Rather, the names on future maps should reflect our best environmental stewardship for the common good.

– Leonard Krishtalka is director of the Biodiversity Institute and a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Kansas University.