http://www.baltimoreexaminer.com/opinion/Species_ending_Its_our_call_story.html

By Frank Keegan
11/16/08
Relax general. Cheer up. Things shall get worse, but they could get better. The choice is ours.

Hearing a vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff utter the words “species ending” about our near future should be enough to wake us all.

Gen. James E. Cartwright uttered the phrase recently during the inaugural Johns Hopkins University Leaders + Legends lecture. He spoke on “Leading Organizational Change to Meet New Challenges.”

What challenges? Financial crises, climate change, weapons of mass destruction widely and readily available to rogue states and lunatic groups. Is that all? No.

“Competition (for scarce world resources) inevitably will lead to conflict,” Cartwright said. “Are we at a tipping point? Yes. Will we have control? No.”

Generals are interested because when leaders of state, commerce and church mess up, armed forces have to clean up.

Cartwright’s love and admiration for the men and women who fight for us if things go wrong is palpable. Figuring out when and where the next conflict breaks out, and how best to combat it, is what generals are supposed to do.

Now they also try to figure out why, and ways to prevent it. For example, a 2004 Department of Defense study determined global warming is the No. 1 threat to the security of the United States. How can that be if there is no such thing?

Just because history proves we turn upon ourselves when stressed with a ferocity unequaled by any other species, is there any reason to think this time will be different?

Nope, according to Cartwright. The stress level is rising, fast. Along with heating things up, we inflict upon ourselves an increasing host of things — from radioactive isotopes to organic chemicals to new and emerging diseases — never before endured by humans.

Family by family, friend by friend we now begin to see the price we pay for our toxic past. We have not seen the worst of it. Our despoiling of our narrow ecological niche leaves us little room for survival.

We are learning the real price of living it up instead of eating bread from the sweat of our brow. We arrogantly believe “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God” beseeched in our Declaration of Independence somehow do not apply to us.

Environmentalists weep about saving Earth when actually our planet is not at risk. We are. Other species come and go. Why not us?

Don’t worry about biodiversity. While exterminating thousands of species, we create opportunities for others. Cockroaches and rats are doing very well. Doing even better are myriad bacteria and viruses. For example, we’ve created perfect environments for growth and spread of staphylococcus and influenza, and the willfully ignorant and criminal negligence of our political and spiritual leaders helped HIV propagate around the globe in less than a decade. Thanks.

Sure, if we ceased all carbon dioxide emissions now it would take only 100,000 years to return to pre-industrial levels.

And those new substances — we cannot even count them all — we poison the born and unborn with will continue to kill us for millennia, especially if we use them as weapons.

But we and we alone hold the power to begin undoing what we have done. The hard fact is environmental responsibility is good business, creating jobs, adding real value and paying long-term dividends.

Environmental atrocities are bad business, merely deferring costs that accrue and compound — costs we cannot refuse to pay. Our ecological deficit is orders of magnitude larger than our fiscal debts, though both grow from our same inherent flaws.

We can pay down both at the same time if we have the wisdom and will to take control.

If we do we can thrive and prosper. If we don’t, Gen. Cartwright is correct. We’re doomed.

Frank Keegan is editor of The Baltimore Examiner. Reach him at fkeegan@baltimoreexaminer.com.

To move forward effectively, we need to know the factual nature of our global ecological history

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4769978.stm

Basically: it’s a deal, but it’s not a big deal. I’d only add that we also keep in mind that even if the Iranian exchange is scheduled to open in late March, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will have any immediate effect on oil markets. In fact it will undoubtedly be only a very minor, secondary exchange for quite some time yet.