Tomgram: Bill McKibben on Our Planetary Fate

The pronghorn antelope, "the prairie ghost," is capable of running at up to sixty miles an hour, twice as fast as any predator in its environment. That extra mileage might seem odd until you realize that, before the last great mammalian megafaunal die-out in North America, some 13,000 to 16,000 years ago, there were evidently creatures (perhaps lions or wolves) which could power along at something close to such speeds. So all those thousands of years, encompassing significant parts of our prehistory and the totality of recorded history from the first days of Ur to the latest disasters in Iraq, and the pronghorn still outraces its ghostly companion. So much time, in human terms, and it still hasn't "registered" its loss; so much time and that niche in our environment remains empty.

It's an evolutionary blink of the eye for the antelope (and its ghost partner). It's not even an evolutionary blink for planet Earth. For us, it's everything. If we wreck our planet, we can't wait another 13,000-16,000 years, no less the millions of years normally involved, to forge a new, well-stocked Earth. For us, when it comes to our environment now is forever.

So, it continually surprises me that this supposedly can-do country, transformed recently into a "homeland" focused on "security," can't lift a finger to do a thing about the environmental degradation going on all around us. The title of Bob Woodward's new bestseller, State of Denial, might have been far better applied to the Bush administration's reaction to our melting planet, or to their complete lack of interest in getting us ready for our "wild" weather ride to come. The odd thing is that, even for those not ready to take global warming or climate change (or whatever name you care to give it) for the staggering danger it is, betting on preparations for it should still be a no-brainer, if not the only sure-fire wager in town. The worst that happens, after all, is that you've put real money into energy conservation and the development of alternative energy sources -- and so into future ! energy independence, the very thing this energy-drunk country obviously needs and, if we are to believe the polls, most American want. Imagine where we'd be now, if we hadn't laughed Jimmy Carter out of the room in 1979 when he suggested investing in a big way in alternative energy R&D. Instead, as Bill McKibben notes below, we've largely ceded the development of wind power -- in fact, the lead in all sorts of alternate energy paths -- to other countries. Haven't we learned anything from the disastrous take-the-money-and-run SUV strategies of GM and Ford in recent years?

Bill McKibben has made something of a career of being ahead of the learning curve in this country on a variety of issues. He's energetic and he's a resource for us all. Thanks to the kindness of the editors of the New York Review of Books, you can check out his latest state-of-the-planet update below. (It will appear in the November 16th issue of the magazine.) Tom

posted by Annamarie at 11:39 PM