Worst Story of 2005

Like most of you, I read the news a lot. But there's one topic I sometimes avoid for fear of what it means. I don't really understand how little attention is devoted to it. Corruption, earthquakes, wars, tsunamis, and hurricanes in real time do not rise to this level of importance. I say this without callously discounting the enormity of the suffering and damage caused by last year's natural disasters. But the melting of the arctic glaciers is the most damning news our little rock and all of its tiny inhabitants can face. We somehow believe that climatic changes are slow beasts whose impact is something way off in the nebulous "future." But that's not the way it works.

True, the earth is patient and has endured amazing abuse, and has stunning redundancy with safeguards that withstand and shift the burdens of human irresponsibility. But over the centuries a borrowing systemic disregard for the world and our stewardship therein may be nearing break point, when all the laws of glacial crawl will mean very little. Somehow we have been duped into the notion that there is a metabolic relationship between progress and the destruction of the environment; meanwhile, there’s a gathering of forces that will change the rules. Sorry to sound apocalyptic, but the tree-huggers may have had it right. This story isn’t new, but now it may be beyond repair.

I invite you to read this story written by the most respectable author on environmental issues (the kind of person the neo-cons love to hate), Bill McKibben. His review-essay is ominously and, I'm afraid, properly titled "The Coming Meltdown." If you don’t feel different after reading it, then you may want to check things out internally.