The bells of New Orleans toll for the whole planet

[bpilgrim]

Comment > Leading Articles
Published: 11 September 2005

Three years ago President Bush received a letter from the then Mayor of New Orleans pleading with him to reverse his position on global warming. Along with the heads of 74 other coastal cities around the world - including 15 in the United States - he wrote to "underline the dangers our communities are facing from global climate change" and urged him to support the Kyoto Protocol. The present mayor added just this summer that global warming "threatened the very existence of New Orleans". No doubt these pleas went into a White House waste-paper basket, there to join a mass of other prophetic warnings of the disaster that has now overtaken the Big Easy. For, despite the President's insistence that no one "anticipated the breach of the levees", this has been the most predicted catastrophe in history.

In the event, even a dramatic change of heart on Kyoto by President Bush would have been too late to save New Orleans - though heeding calls to raise the levees, rather than slashing spending on them, might well have done. The world's natural systems have massive time-lags built into them - so that the warming we are seeing now reflects the pollution of decades ago. But, by the same token, his success in holding up global action on climate change - and his persistent refusal to tackle the United States' overwhelming contribution to it - is storing up even greater disasters for the future.

Article Length: 389 words (approx.)
http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article311762.ece

peace

[kestrel91316]

1. No man is an island ..................ask not for whom the bell tolls,

it tolls for THEE.

No truer words were ever spoken.



Edit: found the whole quote

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." John Donne

[MasonJar]

2. "No man is an islamd entire of itself; every man is a poece of the

continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thine own or thy friend's were. Every man's death diminishes thee for we are involved in mankind, and so, therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." I was trying to send this from memory and I think I left something out in the middle. John Donne's "Meditation 17."