Third Planet from the Sun
The preface of Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the Twenty-First Century puts the global crisis we’re facing in a sobering light:
The natural and social fabric of our planet is being ripped apart. As many as sixty thousand plant species, or one quarter of the world’s total, are in danger of being lost by 2025. More than half the world’s fisheries are already overfished, depleted, or in serious trouble. Water scarcity is increasing and at an accelerating rate. The United Nations panel of over two thousand scientists warns that the planet is heating up rapidly—by as much as eleven degrees Fahrenheit this century. Nearly half the world’s people, some three billion individuals (a number that has risen as globalization has proceeded), now live on less than two dollars a day.
Somewhere, someone is shrugging his or her shoulders and asking, “Well, what can I do?”
And when someone asks a question like that, what they’re really asking is “WHY should I do?”
A bookmark I got from the Housing Works Used Book Cafe sums this up succinctly in three words:
YOU ARE HERE.
If you can’t give of your time, give money. If you aren’t able to do that, make some noise and get the word out: talk to other people; write to your congressman, senator, minister, or MP. Consume less, waste less, drive less, want less, because we’re sucking the planet dry of its resources, and piling it up with more toxins, trash, and filth than it can absorb. This crisis we’re facing is something that defies borders, faith, ethnicity, income, language, and political affiliation.
Don’t wait for someone else to swoop in and solve our problems because there isn’t anyone else.
You are here.
So do something about it.
