To: oped@nytimes.com
Re: The biggest threat is not from terrorism, but from the non-sustainability of our economy and way of life
Date: Tuesday, 23 March 04

 

Two recent editorials in the NYT, one relating to the price of petrol (gasoline), the other to the recycling of domestic waste in New York City ("Pinch at the pump", March 22; "Back to Recycling" March 23), have prompted me to write this response. 

Sensibly, the editorials advocate both fuel economy and waste recycling, but neither conveys any sense of how vitally important, and urgent, these matters are. One gets the impression that compared with international terrorism, for example, fuel economy and waste recycling are fairly trivial matters.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Future generations, looking back at our times, will see sustainability - including fuel economy, waste avoidance and recycling - as the central local, national and global issue, compared to which everything else, including international terrorism, pales into insignificance.

Terrorists may claim thousands, 10's of thousands, even 100's of thousands of lives. Failing to create a sustainable global economy and lifestyles for Earth's projected population 7-9 billion people in the next 2 to 3 decades will result in the deaths of 10's, 100's or even 1000's of millions of people.

In London, where I live, petrol currently costs about 76p per litre, which I think works out at about 5 dollars a US gallon (i.e. 3 times what it costs in America). But even that is not enough to stop this priceless (because non-renewable) natural resource (or "natural treasure", as it is more appropriately called in German) being squandered. Whatever we pay for it, we are effectively dealing in "stolen property", stolen from our own children and coming generations, who are not only going to have to get by without it, but will also have to contend with all the disruption and damage our criminally neglectful and extravagant use of it is causing. 

Until 2002 I lived in Germany, where, before leaving, I was able to recycle at least 90 percent of my household waste. In London that has gone down to less than 25 percent, although there are plans to increase it. In America, attitudes towards recycling seem to be even less well developed than in London.

Few people, it seems, remember the Club of Rome's wake-up call, its report  on the "Limits to Growth" in the early 1970's. That was 30 years ago!

I remember that report, and others, and the discussions they sparked, along with the jokes about company managers and economists no longer aiming for economic growth . . . . Nevertheless, I got the impression that the issue of sustainability was being taken seriously. At one level and by some people it was. But on the whole, we simply stuck our heads in the sand and proceeded with our lives and business as usual. Some of the predictions about how soon a number of natural resources would be in short supply were mistaken, lending support to those who foolishly considered the whole report to be fundamentally flawed.

The modern equivalent of Nero fiddling while Rome burns is the West's, particularly America's, obsession with terrorism, while our economy and way of life are plundering and disrupting the planet.

Stupid people always look for and find the causes of the their biggest problems in others, while wise men look for and find them (and their solutions) in themselves.

It is a pity that Lineaus, I believe it was, couldn't have been a bit more realistic and a little less presumptuous when he chose a name for our species in the 18th Century. Instead of calling us Homo sapiens (wise man), Homo stupidus would have been a lot more appropriate.

The West's achievements are the culmination of more than two and a half thousand years of mainly European history and development, as the descendents of which we have much to be proud of. However, unless we (stupid white men that most of us are) can create a sustainable economy and lifestyles, based on our more enlightened nature, instead of on our primitive, more animal than human nature, as at present, and cultivate an attitude which encourages us to stand (and behave!) in awe and wonder and humility at what we (over two and a half thousand years) have achieved, we are in grave danger of losing it all.