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Global Warming - High price of denial and delay

Share your Thoughts
Posted on March 9, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality

From Margaret Swedish today:   

Would it have been better to have prepared for Hurricane Katrina, to have everything in place for a category 4 or 5 storm, and a breach of the levees protecting New Orleans – something that had been predicted for two decades?  Was it better to have gutted the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and staffed it with incompetent political cronies before the storm hit? 

Would it have been better to have listened to the intelligence warnings in the months leading up to the 9/11 attacks, listened and then taken actions that might have prevented them 

Is it better to pretend that global warming is not happening, that the resulting climate changes are figments of the imagination?  Is it better, therefore, to gut the agencies that might help us prepare, to ridicule the science and the scientists trying to warn us, and then ignore them, to consign the subject to mere debate that needs more study – while animals go extinct, glaciers melt, ocean levels rise, forests die, desertification claims huge portions of the earth, drought and floods wreak more havoc, and on and on? 

No one could anticipate that the levees would break, or Hamas would win the Palestinian election, or Iraq would fall apart if we invaded, or that terrorists would fly planes into buildings, so this administration says, stunning manifestations of the price of denial, or gross negligence. 

In the same vein, surely no one can anticipate global warming and the disasters to come, or that are already happening, despite all the pre-disaster warnings. 

The Planet Can’t Wait, wrote David Ignatius in the Washington Post yesterday. 

Folks, this administration will do nothing to help us prepare by changing the way we live and consume, by signing binding agreements to curb the carbon emissions that are destroying the life-supporting ecosystems of this earth, by shifting our economic and political priorities towards saving the community of life that makes us possible, altering models of development, of economic life, towards those that can keep the worst from happening (extinction) and help us adapt to the new reality already in process. 

All of this, all of this, is necessary. 

Ecological hope rests with you and me.  We must create this movement.  We must shake up the dominant culture and its values, including within ourselves, and find new meaning, reason for getting out of bed in the morning, in the work of saving this earth, and therefore human life, from a fate too terrible to imagine.