'This "human thing" is the permanent process of seeking the sacred through revealing what is hidden. It is an ever ongoing and indefinite process of understanding and interpretation.'

Although it is tempting to think of these natural landscapes as reflecting a stability in climactic and geologic forces, long periods of climactic and geophysical stability actually result in a rundown of the energy available to ecosystems and people. Geologically young regions with recent mountain building and volcanism tend to be much more biologically productive and have supported large populations of people despite their vulnerability to natural disasters. Geologically old regions (like most of Australia) tend to have low biological productivity and supported fewer people.

Reducing consumption is astronomically more critical than increasing system efficiency. It is as if we are distracted building moats around our sandcastles under the growing shadow of an approaching tsunami of unimaginable scale. Speaking of commercial interests' capitalization of our sensibility for "doing the right thing," Curtis White says "...it has appropriated the drama as something it can sell. can turn into product, and thus not only manage but render as a tidy profit."

The poor are ever greater in number, and more distant from social resources like health care, yet more invisible than ever to the affluent. The ice caps shrink and oceans rise, making cities like New Orleans unlivable. Natural resources are depleted at an alarming rate. Fields of soybeans, with a productive life of less than a decade, eat into the Amazon forest like a colony of bacteria eating into a living thing. Giant fisheries are depleted by factory trawlers whose only real product is profit for a very few at the expense of what once looked to be an infinite wealth of food for future generations. Warmer oceans spawn monster storms. Water tables in China, India and the United States fall, threatening desertification and famine. Generally speaking, our "alarm" over these realities is in no way reflected in our daily conduct, which tends to look as if we're perfectly content to go on doing what we're doing, and our desperation is not so much "quiet" as deafening with the noise of automobiles, lawnmowers and television sets.

"Pollution is an unused resource"
-- Bill Mollison

Living a lie destroys the spirit. It is a kind of mental illness, a schizophrenia. It also undermines our credibility. That's why An Inconvenient Truth disappointed me. The night the film premiered in Brattleboro, my husband and I bicycled to the theater and waited in line for tickets. Afterward, we were uplifted: we knew millions of people would watch the movie and would change. I remain grateful for the film and the effect it's having, but what I remember most now are its contradictions. In scene after scene, Al Gore gobbles up fossil fuels: he's behind the wheel of an SUV, he's going through customs, he's on a plane, he's being driven through a city. Even when demonstrating a graph about rising temperatures, Mr. Gore doesn't climb a ladder affixed to the wall. No, he mounts a hydraulic lift.

Altar Call for True Believers
Are we being change, or are we just talking about change?
by Janisse Ray, September/October 2007 Orion