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To:
oped@nytimes.com
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Dear Sir/Madam,
Friday's editorial, "Warming to Global Warming", is seen, no doubt, by yourselves and most of your readers as an expression of the NYT's realistic and enlightened stance on the environment. Certainly, compared with that of the Bush administration, it is. However, the essential question, is whether it is realistic and enlightened enough to help save us from the approaching catastrophe, and I'm afraid the answer is, "No, it is not".
You are not as blind and deeply in denial as the Bush administration, but you are still a long way from recognising the extent, magnitude and urgency of the threat we are facing. There are some good reasons why, and it is important to understand them.
It is very difficult - in fact, bordering on the impossible - to have an objective view of our situation, because from birth we are completely submerged in it and cannot help taking most things for granted. We are programmed and conditioned to see what we are familiar with, used to, and often dependent on, as being perfectly "normal" and thus okay, or at least, not too bad.
The "insanities of normality" are very difficult to see because of their pervasiveness, our familiarity with and dependency on them. Most people are no more able to recognise them than they are able to sense the speed and motions of our planet through space (spinning on its axis, orbiting the Sun, revolving around the centre of the Milky Way and flying away from most of the other galaxies in the universe). It takes exceptional, gifted minds to do so.
I'm one of them - so pay attention!
We are in a very real sense "addicted" to our growth-dependent economy and the grossly materialistic lifestyles it engenders. It is like a drug that was administered to us in the womb and in our mothers' milk, and is what we were weaned on. We don't know any different than being dependent on it, and thus cannot see that we are (or if we do, in a moment of heightened awareness, are scared to death and quickly stick our heads back in the sand). To distract ourselves, satisfy our cravings, and maintain our non-sustainable (and thus doomed) economy and lifestyles, we are quite literally "plundering" our planet, Spaceship Earth.
No wonder we are in denial. Can you even begin to imagine what the consequences would be (must be, if we don't want our own children or grandchildren to curse us for destroying the basis of their future survival and prosperity) if we came out of it? It would mean questioning the very foundations of the economy and way of life we are so familiar with and so dependent on.
The mind-boggling developments of the past few centuries, notwithstanding all the blessings they have brought, are placing a non-sustainable drain and strain on our planet's finite resources and carrying capacity, propelling us at an "exponential" rate towards global catastrophe; and we are rapidly running out of time to make the radical (and I mean radical) changes necessary to avert it.
Thus far, my emails to you have all gone unheeded . . . .
I don't want the bitter satisfaction of one day being able to say, "I told you so", or "I warned you". Nor do I want you accusing me of failing to make my insights plausible enough. I'm doing my best! I want the satisfaction of getting through to you and of knowing that in so doing I helped, in my small way, to steer our civilisation away from catastrophe and towards a future for which coming generations will thank rather than curse us.
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