Can you blame us?
Oct. 28th, 2005 08:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
openspace4lifeAbout forty years ago, before the environmental movement got started in earnest, virtually nobody believed that humanity could have a significant impact on the atmosphere, the global water cycle, or any of the other great global systems that sustain us. The evidence was there--a huge and growing world population, giant cities, plains covered horizon-to-horizon with checkerboards of crop fields--but the idea was too radical to take seriously. In many circles it still is, but nevertheless, the progress environmentalism has made in the past forty years is astounding. Today almost everyone knows that there are people called environmentalists who seek to undo the harm humanity has supposedly done to our planet. In polls, a majority of Americans even assign a high priority to environmental issues, even though more than half of voters still seem to support a decidedly un-environmental administration.
Still, considering the enormity of the task before us--to change not only our technological infrastructure and economic paradigms, but thousands of human cultures and billions of human minds--it seems terrifyingly unlikely that we will have enough time to prevent ecological catastrophe. So perhaps we should be asking ourselves these two hard questions: Can we predict, or perhaps even choose, which catastrophe we will have to face first? And what can we do to prepare for that catastrophe and minimize the death toll?
On the plus side, if it's clear that this catastrophe resulted from human actions, afterward we will probably start to move much more quickly onto the path of sustainability. "Good decisions are the result of experience, which is usually the result of bad decisions." But that said, we still shouldn't give up hope of learning the easy way, however unlikely it may seem. After all, our whole era is characterized by rapidly accelerating change; all we really have to do is point that change in the right direction. If environmentalists can find enough key points of influence in the interlocking web of problems we face, and "a lever and a place to stand" for each one, then perhaps we can move the world in time to dodge the bullet humanity has unwittingly fired at itself.
Still, considering the enormity of the task before us--to change not only our technological infrastructure and economic paradigms, but thousands of human cultures and billions of human minds--it seems terrifyingly unlikely that we will have enough time to prevent ecological catastrophe. So perhaps we should be asking ourselves these two hard questions: Can we predict, or perhaps even choose, which catastrophe we will have to face first? And what can we do to prepare for that catastrophe and minimize the death toll?
On the plus side, if it's clear that this catastrophe resulted from human actions, afterward we will probably start to move much more quickly onto the path of sustainability. "Good decisions are the result of experience, which is usually the result of bad decisions." But that said, we still shouldn't give up hope of learning the easy way, however unlikely it may seem. After all, our whole era is characterized by rapidly accelerating change; all we really have to do is point that change in the right direction. If environmentalists can find enough key points of influence in the interlocking web of problems we face, and "a lever and a place to stand" for each one, then perhaps we can move the world in time to dodge the bullet humanity has unwittingly fired at itself.
