AlterNet: What It Will Take to Build a Sustainable U.S.

What It Will Take to Build a Sustainable U.S.

By Kenny Ausubel, AlterNet. Posted November 1, 2007.


We must imagine a new way of life in order to avoid the devastating environmental crises that face humanity, argues the visionary founder of the Bioneers conference.



The nature of nature is change. Sometimes it hurtles into fast forward, tripping radical shifts. Think of it as nature's regime change. For the first time, people are causing it on a planetary scale.

Andrew Revkin reported in the New York Times that "The physical Earth is increasingly becoming what the human species makes of it. The accelerating and intensifying impact of human activities is visibly altering the planet, requiring ever more frequent redrawing not only of political boundaries, but of the shape of Earth's features themselves."

Mick Ashworth, editor-in-chief of the annual Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, said his staff of 50 cartographers now updates their databases every three and a half minutes. Commented the editor, "We can literally see environmental disasters unfolding before our eyes."

Environmental disasters are always human disasters. Satellite pictures of Burma over the past three years have recorded the extermination of over 3,000 villages of the indigenous Karen people and nearby tribes, displacing half a million people. The main culprit is the corporate hunger for oil and gas, backed by the murderous local military junta.

Google Earth will leave you google-eyed. An overrun resource base is visibly shrinking at the same time our population keeps growing. Honey, we shrunk the planet.

The bottom line, of course, is we're living beyond our means. Nearly two thirds of the life-support services provided to us by nature are in decline worldwide and the pace is quickening. We can't count on the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations. This is new territory.

The big wheels of ecological governance are turning. Regime change is the actual technical term some ecologists use -- for instance, when the climate flips from one state to another. It can be irreversible, at least on a human time frame. These evolutionary exclamation points unleash powerful forces of destruction and creation, collapse and renewal. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/66725/

If we don't get this one right, nothing else will matter. There's a tsunami headed our way.

It reminds me of that Mind of Mencia bit about the tsunami, as he was pointing out how everyone stood on the beach and gaping in awe that the ocean had pulled so far out, but one little girl who had watched Discovery Channel knew this was a precursor to tsunami, told her parents, and many people were saved because of her.

Even if the story isn't true and was jst a comedy bit, the analogy for humanity's situation is treu.

The only difference is that WE are the "little girl who watched the Discovery Channel".

Oh, one more difference, far from being listened to with our life-saving advice, the little girl's parents got very angry with her and stubbornly declared that the whole family would stay on the beach to prove her childish vapor-fear wrong.

And the family was never seen again...

taking care of nature"

That quote makes the point well.