Reply #99: And so it is . . .

[govegan]

But let us not be carried away in hyperbole that obscures the root of the problem.

To be brief, Rachel Carson penned The Sea Around Us in 1950. 1950. 1950. That is over a half century ago now.

Okay, so what?

As the chill of the northern waters has abated and the fish have moved poleward, the fisheries around Iceland have expanded enormously, and it has become profitable for trawlers to push on to Bear Island, Spitsbergen, and the Barents Sea. .....

But for the present, the evidence that the top of the world is growing warmer is to be found on every hand. The recession of the northern glaciers is going on at such a rate that many smaller ones have already disappeared. If the present rate of melting continues others will soon follow them.

The melting away of the snowfields in the Opdal Mountains in Norway has exposed wooden-shafted arrows of a type used around A.D. 400 to 500. This suggests that the snow cover in this region must now be less than it has been at any time within the past 1400 to 1500 years.
.......
The continents themselves dissolve and pass to the sea, in grain after grain of eroded land. So the rains that rose from it return again in rivers. In its mysterious past it encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives in the end, after, it may be, many transmutations, the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea—to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.

So is climate change, an altered atmosphere, the root of the problem which confronts today all of life on this planet, or might it be merely a symptom? And if a symptom, wherein lies the malady, the heart of the disease?

From 1961:

Freedom to waste began in North America's colonial days, when resources were deemed “inexhaustible.” Men burned trees to get rid of them, shot to near-extinction bison and pigeons for the joy of killing, used the land until it was exhausted, abandoned it to water and wind erosion, and moved onto new free land. If Professor Paul Sears, in Deserts on the March, is right in assuming that civilized man has converted fertile land masses into deserts by deforestation, over-grazing and open cultivation, and that modern man has carried the process faster and further than his predecessors, then waste of natural resources under free enterprise is robbing mankind of the foundation upon which life and well-being depend.... Again freedom to exploit and compete has been converted from a promise into a menace on a scale so vast that it threatens the well-being and survival of the entire human race.

(and for the sake of brevity)

Freedom is not enough. The power age is in desperate need not so much of free men and women as of disciplined, responsible, dedicated citizens. Its future, nay, its very survival requires not free nations but nations and peoples willing and able to subordinate fatherland defense to the requirements of peace, justice and the common welfare.

From Scott Nearing in Freedom: Promise and Menace, A Critique on the Cult of Freedom.

A will not evidenced in the USA today, obviously.

You must not only aim aright,
But draw the bow with all your might. -- HD Thoreau

Strength Through Peace – Kucinich 2008