New thinking to save the earth by By James Carroll

[YankeyMCC]

Published in the Boston Globe:

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THIS WEEK, spring fever takes the form of the fever pitch to which concern over global warming is rising. Last Saturday was the National Day of Climate Action, a campaign organized by writer Bill McKibben, aimed at getting Congress to "step it up" and cut US carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. Next Sunday is Earth Day -- part festival and part political demonstration, always a call to action for the environment.
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Such adjustments can seem like nuisances at one end or monumental challenges at the other, but behavioral responses to potential ecological disaster are the easy part. Far more challenging is the task of revising the way we think about basic aspects of how we live. If the earth is to survive as a human habitat the meaning of subjects like these must be transformed:

Nature. We Americans, speaking generally, see a gulf between ourselves and "nature." From created worlds of concrete, we make occasional forays into given realms of trees, rock, sand, or sea. We go "back to nature" as if we left it behind when, say, we put clothes on or built cities. But this sense of detachment allows us to imagine we can trash nature without trashing ourselves. Conversely, nature's mechanism for saving itself includes human ingenuity. We humans are not above nature or apart from it. We are of nature.

Nation. A 19th-century notion of national sovereignty allows sub groups to pursue agendas without regard for their effects on the whole. But this wrongly assumes that the health of the whole is a matter of indifference to the group. The United States has long refused to temper its claim to radical independence from all other nations, but that both defines the source of America's disproportionate ecological destructiveness and impedes every effort to mitigate it. There will be no stopping environmental degradation until nations stop thinking of independent sovereignty as an absolute. Climate change respects no borders.
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http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/04/16/new_thinking_to_save_the_earth/

[Uncle Joe]

1. Excellent column by James Carroll

I'm amazed, when someone believes 6+ billion people with hundreds of millions of cars spewing poison into the atmosphere, not to mention all the industrial contribution to pollution can have no effect on the small blue marble, which serves as humankind's only home in the known universe.

As someone else posted on a different thread, there is a reason most animals don't foul their own homes with their waste. I believe it's because evolution thinned out the ones that did through sickness and death, the end result is, they have more sense than we do. The last time we forgot this lesson, the bubonic plague took approximately a third of Europe's population. I believe Global Warming will ultimately be a much less forgiving teacher.

Thanks for the thread Yankey

Kicked and recommended