It's The Environment, Stupid!

Quite apart from the fact that I think GM, Ford and Chrysler deserve to die a horrible, painful death so that they can finally make way for an era of earth-friendly transportation, I have very grim reasons for writing about climate change.

It is a sign of our times that in a U.S. Geological Survey study of teenagers across four different continents, the word "Amazon" evoked recognition of the online shopping portal, not the beautiful Brazilian coppice.

It isn't their fault at all. This is the world we are going to leave them.

What is astonishing is that the numbers have not as yet induced absolute panic among us, and I wonder why. Perhaps statistics are not easy to relate to, but the stories and images should at least make a dent - polar bears resorting to cannibalism as their habitats vanish, the jaw-dropping photos of polar ice caps that have melted in less than a generation, the sheer idiocy of people fighting over land, and endangering a rare species of gorilla in the process...the list grows longer, and we grow anesthetized to it all.

I wonder if part of the problem is that it doesn't manifest itself as a single problem - there are different components to it, and the events (or issues), and the facts are both sporadic in terms of time and geographically isolated. As a result, in all our hurry to close the gaps between ourselves through communication and travel, we have somehow not managed to stitch together the factors that could resonate with a single message - this is our only home right now, and we are too weak, too unprepared to survive on any other piece of rock in the blasted universe.

Oh, there are Kyoto Agreements and Green Peace-like organizations here and there. But against the seemingly unstoppable chorus of economic ambition - which in itself is obviously mired in political, legal and religious muck of various kinds - what chance do the Amazon rain forests have?

Given our inability to articulate the problem effectively so as to cause enough of a stir, I would advocate the oldest, most effective solution in the book - the law. Recycling, energy-friendly lifestyles, carbon-emission caps all, I strongly believe, need to be enforced, simply because we are running out of time. After all, it's not as if we can manufacture more oxygen like currency notes to fix the system after a couple of failed experiments. And how is the situation any less urgent than the financial crisis, anyway?

The world is watching to see how the governments of the G-20 countries that met in Washington will breathe life into their economies. I am waiting, with equally bated breath, for them to stop sitting on their hands and to reconvene for climate change.

Perhaps this is a start in that direction.

Update: I'm also planning on checking out this interesting looking documentary.