Thomas Friedman of The New York Times has been writing for a long time about the need to act in order to avoid an environmental catastrophe. Given the absence of change in public policy that his well-argued articles have generated, it is amazing that he finds the energy to keep repeating the same points. He is correct; but not enough people with the power to change things are listening. Nevertheless, continue writing he does, although with growing exasperation and increasingly dramatic rhetoric:
“You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century … and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?”
In the article in the url below, Friedman interviews Paul Gilding who used to be a Director of Greenpeace, but now works independently advocating for change in environmental policy around the world. He has recently published a new book, ‘The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World’ (http://paulgilding.com/the-great-disruption).
The article is good (as always), but there were a couple of quotes that caught my eye and, I think, place the scale and urgency of the problem in some perspective:
“‘If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,’ writes Gilding. ‘If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.’”
Take care
David
Instructor Teaching Site: http://www.sagepub.com/strategiccsr/
The library of CSR Newsletters are archived at: http://strategiccsr-sage.blogspot.com/
The Earth is Full
By Thomas L. Friedman
June 8, 2011
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
A21
