Fall is a beautiful season. I take special pleasure in my daily morning walk near the Holmes Run Creek in Alexandria, Virginia where I have lived for 32 years. On Saturday mornings the park near my home fills with dozens of very young children with their parents getting ready to practice the first steps of soccer.
These young soccer players are a delight to watch running after the ball, trying to follow the loud instructions from their parents standing nearby, coxing them on.
Yet, there�s tragedy behind this fun. The car of choice of the soccer moms, nearly without exception, is the so-called Sports Utility Vehicle, a goliath of size and pollution.
If the soccer moms, probably well-educated members of the upper middle class, think so little about the consequences of their actions, what is one to say about the working class that aspires to the SUV “lifestyle” sold on American TV?
There�s a faith in the land that says technology will cure all anomalies: cancer, obesity, drug addiction, and contaminated food, including global warming.
Most people are so obsessed with earning enough cash for making a living or for purchasing an endless stream of goods and fantasies that they reject the idea that melting ice in the Arctic, the Himalayan mountains or Alaska has anything to do with them, much less with the warming of the earth. That�s why soccer moms drive their children with SUVs, not associating their military vehicles with heat-trapping gases.
Then Americans buy the religion of science, sold to them as the magic bullet of pills, each designed to take care of their neuroses and pathologies. This mindset is hostile to political thinking and Americans fail consistently to connect cause and effect, in which case, the disease of the soccer moms could be terminal.
This is because the car passion of soccer moms is one of the fuels of globalization: Chinese, Indians, Indonesians and Brazilians want SUVs no less that the soccer moms of northern Virginia.
The planet is getting warmer, however. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been documenting the human origins of higher temperatures: that we are living through an environmental emergency. Deforestation, for example, is responsible for 20 percent of all greenhouse gases; animal factories for another 18 percent, the remaining from the burning of coal, petroleum and gas.
The risks of a warmer earth are unmistakable. Higher temperatures are changing the chemistry of the oceans. They cause draught, killing animals and plants, and giving rise to new diseases. Melting ice increases the water of seas and oceans; and global warming fuels strange and violent storms. Global warming also accelerates the destructive and toxic impact of industrialized ocean fishing, car-based transportation, industrialized farming, mining, logging. War, the ultimate in the destruction of humans and nature, boosts the deleterious effects of higher temperatures.
This human behavior is nearly suicidal because it fouls our only nest, making it very difficult to have and maintain what we must have – plenty of clean drinking water and air, food uncontaminated by toxins, and a healthy natural world, especially that.
It is not too late to move away from the precipice. With minimum of inconvenience, soccer moms can abandon SUVs for hybrids.
The real trouble is with the world economy, which cannibalizes the earth while it raises global temperature.
Nevertheless, for the first time in history, all the countries of the world must act together for self-defense. Replace oil, coal and gas by the limitless energy of the sun. Raise $ 500 billion a year for solar energy research from taxing the profits of global corporations; within a decade or less, coal and petroleum will become obsolete.
The United States must stop having an Exxon Mobil foreign policy that, in 3-14 December 2007, disrupted a global climate summit in Bali, Indonesia. The “road map” of Bali is no better than that of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Trading pollution or fighting over “caps on emissions” is obscene.
The goal ought to be the speedy end of greenhouse gases, not their regulation. And India and China should stop demanding that those who caused the climate emergency, America, Europe, Australia and Japan, ought to supply them with gadgets and money for cleaner factories. That is dishonest because they are huge polluters, too.
Finally, we need a Global Environment Organization to protect humans and nature from the warming of the earth and other environmental dangers. GEO ought to have the authority to abolish fossil fuels and replace them with energy from the sun and other green alternatives.
For the first time in history, nations have to cede their sovereignty to a supra-national institution, GEO, for the sole benefit of humanity and the natural world. Humans managing GEO must be the world�s best citizens, like philosopher-kings, modeling their lives and behavior after Plato�s guardians, entirely devoted to what is good for the earth and its people.
These new guardians must reorganize the planetary economy to accommodate the rapid transition out of fossil fuels and into solar energy. Economic activities that devour nature like logging, damming of rivers, or the razing of the Amazon for soybean plantations must come to an end. Transportation systems relying on SUV-like technologies ought to be abandoned for public transportation and very small electric or hybrid cars. Industrialized farming and fishing must be replaced immediately by their democratic and gentle alternatives: traditional family agriculture and fishing.
In general, humans must find a way to earn a living without injuring or killing the natural world. Global warming is the first signal that business as usual or market capitalism is dangerous.
E.G. Vallianatos, a former EPA analyst, is the author of “This Land is Their Land” and “The Passion of the Greeks.” www.vallianatos.com
Source : http://www.hellenicnews.com/readnews.html?newsid=8513&lang=US
These young soccer players are a delight to watch running after the ball, trying to follow the loud instructions from their parents standing nearby, coxing them on.
Yet, there�s tragedy behind this fun. The car of choice of the soccer moms, nearly without exception, is the so-called Sports Utility Vehicle, a goliath of size and pollution.
If the soccer moms, probably well-educated members of the upper middle class, think so little about the consequences of their actions, what is one to say about the working class that aspires to the SUV “lifestyle” sold on American TV?
There�s a faith in the land that says technology will cure all anomalies: cancer, obesity, drug addiction, and contaminated food, including global warming.
Most people are so obsessed with earning enough cash for making a living or for purchasing an endless stream of goods and fantasies that they reject the idea that melting ice in the Arctic, the Himalayan mountains or Alaska has anything to do with them, much less with the warming of the earth. That�s why soccer moms drive their children with SUVs, not associating their military vehicles with heat-trapping gases.
Then Americans buy the religion of science, sold to them as the magic bullet of pills, each designed to take care of their neuroses and pathologies. This mindset is hostile to political thinking and Americans fail consistently to connect cause and effect, in which case, the disease of the soccer moms could be terminal.
This is because the car passion of soccer moms is one of the fuels of globalization: Chinese, Indians, Indonesians and Brazilians want SUVs no less that the soccer moms of northern Virginia.
The planet is getting warmer, however. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been documenting the human origins of higher temperatures: that we are living through an environmental emergency. Deforestation, for example, is responsible for 20 percent of all greenhouse gases; animal factories for another 18 percent, the remaining from the burning of coal, petroleum and gas.
The risks of a warmer earth are unmistakable. Higher temperatures are changing the chemistry of the oceans. They cause draught, killing animals and plants, and giving rise to new diseases. Melting ice increases the water of seas and oceans; and global warming fuels strange and violent storms. Global warming also accelerates the destructive and toxic impact of industrialized ocean fishing, car-based transportation, industrialized farming, mining, logging. War, the ultimate in the destruction of humans and nature, boosts the deleterious effects of higher temperatures.
This human behavior is nearly suicidal because it fouls our only nest, making it very difficult to have and maintain what we must have – plenty of clean drinking water and air, food uncontaminated by toxins, and a healthy natural world, especially that.
It is not too late to move away from the precipice. With minimum of inconvenience, soccer moms can abandon SUVs for hybrids.
The real trouble is with the world economy, which cannibalizes the earth while it raises global temperature.
Nevertheless, for the first time in history, all the countries of the world must act together for self-defense. Replace oil, coal and gas by the limitless energy of the sun. Raise $ 500 billion a year for solar energy research from taxing the profits of global corporations; within a decade or less, coal and petroleum will become obsolete.
The United States must stop having an Exxon Mobil foreign policy that, in 3-14 December 2007, disrupted a global climate summit in Bali, Indonesia. The “road map” of Bali is no better than that of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Trading pollution or fighting over “caps on emissions” is obscene.
The goal ought to be the speedy end of greenhouse gases, not their regulation. And India and China should stop demanding that those who caused the climate emergency, America, Europe, Australia and Japan, ought to supply them with gadgets and money for cleaner factories. That is dishonest because they are huge polluters, too.
Finally, we need a Global Environment Organization to protect humans and nature from the warming of the earth and other environmental dangers. GEO ought to have the authority to abolish fossil fuels and replace them with energy from the sun and other green alternatives.
For the first time in history, nations have to cede their sovereignty to a supra-national institution, GEO, for the sole benefit of humanity and the natural world. Humans managing GEO must be the world�s best citizens, like philosopher-kings, modeling their lives and behavior after Plato�s guardians, entirely devoted to what is good for the earth and its people.
These new guardians must reorganize the planetary economy to accommodate the rapid transition out of fossil fuels and into solar energy. Economic activities that devour nature like logging, damming of rivers, or the razing of the Amazon for soybean plantations must come to an end. Transportation systems relying on SUV-like technologies ought to be abandoned for public transportation and very small electric or hybrid cars. Industrialized farming and fishing must be replaced immediately by their democratic and gentle alternatives: traditional family agriculture and fishing.
In general, humans must find a way to earn a living without injuring or killing the natural world. Global warming is the first signal that business as usual or market capitalism is dangerous.
E.G. Vallianatos, a former EPA analyst, is the author of “This Land is Their Land” and “The Passion of the Greeks.” www.vallianatos.com
Source : http://www.hellenicnews.com/readnews.html?newsid=8513&lang=US
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