200 species become extinct every day. We're not one of them, so who cares?

[greyl]

When I was growing up in the fifties, the future looked like a coming paradise, where everything was just going to get better and better and better. We were all going to scoot around in our private helicopters and sit around the pool while robots did all the work. The future began to look a bit iffy when the Cold War started in earnest and every year you scanned maps in the newspaper showing your chances of surviving a direct nuclear strike on your city.

Then in 1962 Rachel Carson dropped a mind-boggling bomb of her own, in Silent Spring . The earth doesn't just placidly swallow any quantity of any poison and give it back as fresh water. There's a price to be paid for dumping poison into the land and the sea--and, believe it or not, this was staggering news at the time. We'd thought for thousands of years that we could do any damn thing we wanted.

Then just six years later Paul Ehrlich dropped another bomb on us–The Population Bomb. Wow, the future was beginning to look downright GRIM.

But there were things we could DO--at least about some of this. We could, by God, see to it that the government tightened up controls on polluting industries. We could join environmental organizations and vote for environmental candidates. It came as a surprise--to those of us who cared--to see that some very popular politicians cared a whole lot more about polluting industries than they did about us. It took us a while to see that environmentalists were being perceived as people who were in favor of IT--the environment--and AGAINST us humans. Political candidates soon began to shut up about protecting the environment.

more...

www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf

[pansypoo53219]

1. and abortion takes out less than fertility

than fertility drugs add.

the planet is fucked.

[greyl]

2. Heheh, well, the planet will be as fine as ever. Our culture is a different story.

I'm sure many of you are familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.

I looked at one famous tipping point in Ishmael: the crumbling of the Soviet Union, which took the world by complete surprise in the late 1980s. That's exactly what occurs when a tipping point is reached. No one realizes anything's going on but something has been building, building, building--beneath the surface. In the case of the Soviet Union what had been building was a mind-change that had been gaining momentum since the 1960s. And suddenly and unexpectedly, in 1989, what had started as a tiny minority had become a majority--not an overwhelming majority, but one big enough to allow Mikhail Gorbachev to make sweeping changes that ultimately concluded with the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

We too are in a minority right now--there's no doubt about that. But we're a growing minority, and there's no doubt about that either.

www.ishmael.org/Education/Writings/bioneers.cfm

[MedleyMisty]

3. Got links to articles with credible sources saying that global warming

and our destruction of the environment and our overpopulation won't change anything or make other species extinct or have any effect at all?

[greyl]

4. No, of course I don't. When I said "planet", I didn't mean the community of life on Earth.

I meant Earth the planet in the way that Mars is a planet.