(no subject)

[sillygoosegirl]

I often wonder how different America, and the world, would be right now if Al Gore had been elected won the election in 2000. I finally got around to watching "An Inconvenient Truth" in December, and currently I am reading "Earth in the Balance," not that I wasn't plenty worried about the issue before. I think of the section about Easter Island in "Collapse" regularly, and the illustration it gives of our dependency on a healthy environment. For those of you who haven't read it, a 1 sentence synopsis of Easter Island is that Easter Island supported a large and prosperous civilization, but they depended heavily on the large palm trees for building many things including their sea-worthy canoes (deep water fishing making an important part of the food source) and the fertility of the soil to grow crops, so after they used the trees to extinction and their top soil became depleted, they were trapped on an island which could no longer support their population. The Earth is a much bigger and more complex system than Easter Island, but it is itself an island. We have no where else to go. And this is increasingly relevant as we are increasingly able to affect the environment on a global scale. If we screw up and don't take proper care of Her before it is too late, we could find ourselves in pretty much the same situation as the Easter Islanders.

So many of the other issues facing our society seem so trivial to me when compared with the climate crisis. 9/11, the war in Iraq, even the rising cost of health care, the gap between rich and poor, education, and a woman's right to choose--what do any of those issues really matter if we can't leave a healthy environment to our children and grand children? I wonder how different the world would be today if we had spent the last 6 years concentrating as a nation on things that actually matter... instead of fighting a pointless war half way around the globe.