Hope for the future in spite of environmental backlash

[IrateCitizen]

The Long Way Home
By Kenny Ausubel, AlterNet. Posted October 15, 2004.

You have to figure the Force is with you when Yoda gets on board. In this case, "Yoda" is the Pentagon's term of endearment for Andrew Marshall, a revered military oracle who heads up an elite military think tank that envisions future threats to national security. After reading a 2002 National Academy of Sciences report on global warming, the octogenarian sage decided that indeed the sky is falling. He commissioned two master futurists to produce an analysis.

Their report, titled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for US National Security," draws on recent research showing that climate change can be very sudden, occurring in a matter of a decade or two. This has actually occurred at least twice before that we know of – about 8,000 and 11,000 brief biological years ago.

SNIP

The report demurely suggests this: "Alternative fuels, greenhouse gas emissions controls and conservation efforts are worthy endeavors." It concludes by posing the alternative: "Abrupt climate change is likely to stretch carrying capacity well beyond its already precarious limits. Disruption and conflict may well be endemic features of life ... Every time there is a choice between starving and raiding, humans raid."

Some choice.

As reporter Andrew Zaitchik summed up the Pentagon's response, "The Department of Defense and Energy have recently installed photovoltaic panels atop the enormous building's five-sided roof. And if a solar-powered Death Star isn't the perfect symbol of humanity's two possible futures, then I don't know what is."

There is indeed a clash of civilizations, but in this case it is not between Islam and the West, or tradition and modernism. It is between a disposable civilization and a sustainable civilization. We have created a civilization that is a suicide bomb. We need to start disarming it right away.

READ THE REST AT: http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/20180/