Do We Learn?

I was speaking with someone today about global warming. In effect, they said the great intellectually unwashed of America do not care. They drive their SUVS from place to place in the exburbs (which incidentally represent a vast fragmentation of landscapes necessary to protect the atmosphere and other natural resources) while the cities languish and rot.

All this is bad for the environment. And it is true, that description of the Unites States is accurate to a much larger extent than I normally want to think, even if Newsweek did do an article about climate change and global warming this week.

I came home to a post from a friend http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032500025.html
to the effect that we have been there, done that in the storms that hit South Florida in 1926 and 1928. And we are about to repeat sad history in the wake of Katrina in Louisiana. The same friend sent me and article by Bryan Walsh with Susan Jakes and Jodi Xu/ Beijing from Time magazine, in effect saying it can get much, much worse once the people of India and China decide to be as unwashed as we are. Unless of course, they can do us better, energy wise. Which they may.

I went to http://www. fightglobalwarming.com and calculated my own carbon footprint. Despite living in Maine in a tiny house, I DO travel for work. My carbon footprint, 18.6 metric tons of carbon is equivalent to cutting and burning all the trees in a section of the Amazon rainforest the size of 2.2 football fields. This is disheartening. So I can be as self-righteous as I like about global warming but all I need to do is look in the mirror to se a great unwashed.