Various aspects of climate change, “global warming,” environmental degradation, etc. have been referred to as “causes” of many of society’s problems when, in reality, they are results of a far more important phenomenon, the huge, unsustainable and growing current human population, the prime cause of the

other causes. The technical methods of alleviating the growing short-comings of our life-giving environments will be obsolete by the time they are implemented… outstripped by the size of the population.

You might find the views of Eric Pianka interesting and edifying:

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Vanishing.Book.text.pdf

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Everybody.html

http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/bio213/why.html

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Controversy.html

The otherwise perhaps flawed domestic policies of China may not be to our liking, but their “one child” per parents should have our blessing and be adopted by the rest of the world as soon and completely as possible. It is nothing less than mandatory. It is the fastest (60 years), the cheapest (zero cost), the most easily participated (no one need do anything – merely do not have a second child) method with essentially no counter-acting side effects.This action obviates the need for all the programs now being touted and it will put the world back to the number of people, resulting from millions of years of linear growth, which existed about 250 years ago, when it was hardly under populated, but it was before the ruinous logarithmic growth that has occurred since. As Dennis Meadows said:”Any environmental issue that doesn’t list overpopulation as the main problem is a lost cause.” Or, as this line on the stationery of The Committee of Concerned Scientists states:”If we do not solve our overpopulation problem ourselves, sagely and humanely, the problem will be solved for us by Nature, efficiently and savagely.”

Cheers

On the other hand I still have grass growing in my yard and today, in late November, I went for a 3 mile walk in Andover, MA in my t-shirt. It was really quite pleasant. I was beginning to think that if a few dead polar bears wash ashore in front of my house that would be a small price to pay for beachfront property this far from the current coastline.

OK, OK, I know what you’re all thinking : “ocean acidification”. But it’s not too late to start breeding fish that can survive in a tub of seltzer water, which is what we’re turning the ocean into. It might give them a nice tangy taste. BTW, has anyone considered the irony that the Polar Seltzer Company’s corporate logo is a polar bear?

http://www.kuow.org/programs/weekday.asp?Archive=11-21

That seems manipulative.

I think it’s one thing to present facts and data and let people make up their own minds, but if we use emotionally-manipulative methods to try to “sell” environmental policy we’re stooping to the same level Bush did trying to get people to buy into the invasion of Iraq.

I think that you can’t MAKE people truly care about something – the best you can do with a hard sell is get them temporarily worked up into some kind of froth.

Also, if you compare the number of responses on this thread to, say, the one about Borat, I think it paints a pretty clear picture of just how much even NPR listeners care about the topic.

I think getting people to care starts moving with heavy duty PR as much as policy. What we saw with the demonizing of people who wanted to save whales, trees, and spotted owls in the 80s and 90s, and even today can be overcome and reversed with effective communication. Additionally, the reds should not be able to easily dismiss and politicize lefty-enviros in the cavalier way that has been accepted for the last half century as information becomes more available and the truth more persuasive and pervasive.

Global Climate Change is obviously a bigger, longer road to hoe than litter, but once the stewardship can be engendered, even the most crass and irrational deniers of truth can be engaged and their behavior modified. Everyone can do something to help, and once engaged most people want to. They just don’t want to pay for it now, once they get to visualize the behavioral change as a long term investment rather than a temporary expense most people come around.

I am alarmed, though, it appears environmental issues are taking a back seat to the more immediate issues in the ‘new’ congress and senate. They need to lead on this issue.

so I did nothing…….

It’s not pretty and it’s very familiar: the suburbs.

Now I listen to the construction industry co-opting the language of the green movement by calling everything ‘sustainable’, no matter how marginal the effects.

And the buying public is be-numbed by the sustainability buzz.

Last week I heard Al Gore speak his litany in Seattle and have been in a major funk ever since.

His uber-message is: ‘We’re cooked’. I already knew this.

I think there’s no way to stop the warming engine. The dominant human hunter-gatherer behavior has provided a positive feedback loop (drill for oil quickly where the ice is gone); it’s a runaway system.

The meaningful question needs to be framed as deep human ecology. How might we live through the chaos of great system change? (SUV’s as interim housing, etc?)

The neo-cons, the religious fundamentalist hatred-mongers, the ‘terrorism as a political expedient’ folks; these are but the first screams of an eco-system swinging wildly out of balance.

If I understand the chaos theory subtext, (cocktail napkin level) it takes some wild swinging for a living system to find a new adjustment state. In fact that’s the only way it happens. We’ve made a mess. Earth will clean it up.

James Lovelock posed this as the GAIA hypothesis to NASA and the scientific community in +/-1986. His breakthrough observation was that the atmospheric signature of a planet which is supporting life is that it is wildly out of balance, i.e. its chemistry is far from inert.

Being an optimist I assume life will prevail. But hold onto your hats; we’re going for a great big ride.