Directory of Lost Causes

Here's a quote from the word-a-day e-mail group to which I subscribe:

"The climate chaos that would unleash would make the mere collapse of
industrial society a sideshow bagatelle."
Robert Newman; It's Capitalism or a Habitable Planet - You Can't Have
Both; The Guardian (London, UK); Feb 2, 2006.

Well, I'm a person who doesn't like to perspire, OR show my legs in public, so global warming has never sounded even vaguely attractive to me.

I'm afraid that a worldwide plague may indeed be one of the factors involved in resolving the current situation. The more you try to control things, you more you fuck them up. Antibiotics will probably be useless before too long...

I'm not actually pessimistic. Not any more. It doesn't really matter what happens to the human race. There are more important things, and they will always be there.

'Global warming' could well involve an ice age for Britain.

I don't think global warming is a prediction for the future, though. It's happening now, and it's quite observable. Climate change might be the more accurate term. And if we're to take Seth Godwin's cue, maybe we should use a more attention-grabbing term such as eco-cancer. Climate change itself is only part of the problem. The world's supply of potable water is also diminishing rapidly, and it seems likely that military conflicts will occur in the near future over the possession of water.

What is also taking place, even as we speak, but is less talked about, is the fact that wildlife is currently dying off at an unprecented rate. The primary cause, well, it looks likely to be the activities of human beings.

http://www.well.com/~davidu/extinction.html

When I said I'm not pessimistic, I don't mean that we should ignore what is happening around us. On a cosmic scale, of course, it doesn't matter, since we are only blips in eternity. However, it is simply the sane thing to do - and therefore not the typically human thing to do - to try and address the environmental problems that we have caused.

How do we do this? Clearly the political obsession with economic growth is a huge stumbling block here. For instance, most alternative power sources that are being suggested are those that can be made into a money-generating, centralised project. A better answer would be localised power sources. Solar power generated privately in people's homes would go a long way to solving the engery problem, but it's not being pushed because it would mean there are no middle-men to make a profit out of it.

Well, I don't want to go off on one, but this is important, and I personally believe that we need a combination of spiritual evolution and the practical implementation of informed measures (there's nothing informed about the idea of reviving nuclear power).

I meant Seth Godin, of course.