It's hard to know how immediate and personal a threat is when we are presented with large scale abstractions - like, "global warming will cause the seas to rise." Yet, the price of oil appears to be going up, and the U.S. dollar appears to be going down. How concerned about change are you? Whether social, economic, climate, honey bees, antibiotic resistant bugs, or the dying rising seas?
Hopeful, or hopeless - how might your relationship with your environment change in the next ten years, including the people in your life (neighbors, family, friends)?
Rising petroleum prices (peak oil).
Climate changes (carbon footprint).
National debt (est. 9 trillion).
Baby boomers coming of age (equities, services, "brain drain").
Increasing world population.
Hopeful, or hopeless - how might your relationship with your environment change in the next ten years, including the people in your life (neighbors, family, friends)?
Rising petroleum prices (peak oil).
Climate changes (carbon footprint).
National debt (est. 9 trillion).
Baby boomers coming of age (equities, services, "brain drain").
Increasing world population.
4 comments:
“We have to be careful not to rush from denial to despair. We are in an era of creative destruction. What happens when you go into one of these periods is that before you get to the point of reconstruction things have to fall apart. Detroit will fall apart. I think Ford (a company that Elkington has advised for years) will fall apart. They have just made too many bets on the wrong things. A bunch of institutions that we rely on currently will, to some degree, decompose. I believe that much of what we count as democratic politics today will fall apart, because we are simply not going to be able to deal with the scale of change that we are about to face. It will profoundly disable much of the current political class.”
“I wrote my first report on climate change in 1978, for Herman Kahn, at the Hudson Institute. He did not at all like what I was saying, and he told me, ‘The trouble with you environmentalists is that you see a problem coming and you slam your foot on the breaks and try to steer away from the chasm. The problem is that it often doesn’t work. Maybe the thing to do is jam your foot on the pedal and see if you can jump across.’ At the time, I thought he was crazy, but as I get older I realize what he was talking about. The whole green movement in technology is in that space. It is an attempt to jump across the chasm.”
John Elkington (SustainAbility.com), from February 25, 2008, New Yorker, article, “Big Foot.”
Lately, in my pessimism and feeling like the proverbial "deer in the headlights", I want to turn inward. All my volunteer activities for the environment are as drops of water into an ocean, and a violent, pitching ocean at that.
I can't quite wrap my brain around the future right now because living day to day has become a bit of a struggle. For many people, it's hard to see past today for a variety of reason. Many of the families I deal with are just trying to survive, no matter what it takes. I know that our way of life has to change (I've felt this way since I was a little kid!)I was the first grader who spent outdoor gym time in the field next to our school pretending to grind corn with stones. Who knows where THAT came from. At any rate, for my own survival's sake at the moment, I can't go that far into the future. I spent years looking ahead to our demise as a ten, into my 20s and 30s, realizing it was feeding the depression I was battling.
"An estimated 10 million American baby boomers will develop Alzheimer's disease in their lifetime, placing enormous strains on the U.S. health-care system and the already overburdened network of caregivers, a new report predicts."
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
The Washington Post
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