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Opinion - Monday, April 18,
2005

The environment On the edge
of destiny

EDITORIAL

Through the arrogance of hindsight, all Americans find some
things hard to imagine.

How could anyone have sat back silently and allowed millions of
fellow human beings to be bought and sold like livestock, then
tortured, raped, murdered or worked to death and thrown out like
trash?

How could anyone have allowed promises of peace upon promises of
peace to be broken, and millions of fellow human beings stripped of
their native land, ancient culture and often their very lives so an
invading horde of slaveholders and industrialists from the east
coast could devour a continent?

How could so many have been idle for so long while that horde
kept women as possessions, turned children into cheap labor and left
the old, the weak and the poor to die every time the tide of their
economy turned against them?

To survive as a modern American, we either ignore these parts of
our public past or we convince ourselves we are different people. If
we were there, in our grandparents' time, we would not have been
blinded by greed and comfort. We would have changed things.

Well, we are there.

In recent years, the world has been repeatedly presented with
evidence that we are on the road to an environmental catastrophe. In
one major study, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment released March
30, more than 1,300 experts from 95 countries worked for years to
look at the future of the earth, and how that future will affect
humanity. The study found 60 percent of ecosystems that support life
are being degraded or used in a way that cannot be sustained. That
destruction - to fresh water resources, the ocean's fisheries, to
clean air, to forests and species diversity - threatens humanity
with new diseases, loss of water and food, and shifts in regional
climates. Those consequences could cost billion of dollars and claim
millions of lives.

We, as Americans, play the largest single role in all this. We
have the world's largest economy, and the single largest source of
greenhouse gasses. We are 5 percent of the world's population, yet
we consume 26 percent of its energy resources. More than that, we
are the sole superpower on this planet. In that position we steer
the politics and economics of the world - and with them the
environmental choices others around the world are driven to make.

Even here in Tompkins County, as a new series by reporter Jennie
Daley on growth and environmental issues that began in Saturday's
Journal highlights, we are now facing critical decision that will
define our quality of life for generations. Tompkins County is
expected to add 5,300 new homes between 2000 and 2009, with the bulk
of that development going in rural areas light on the infrastructure
needed to protect key environmental resources.

But being at this critical time locally, and beings Americans at
this critical time in human history, offers us a historic
opportunity. The choices we make on consumption, resource
allocation, and conservation can have a greater impact on the health
of our planet than any people, anywhere, at any time have ever been
allowed. We can make choices in global politics and in how we live
every day in our homes that can recast the fate of the environment
our grandchildren will inherit.

Learn. Talk. Use public forums - including this opinion page - to
share ideas and solutions. Demand more from the corporations and
governments that serve you.

Or risk being the people our grandchildren will imagine they
could never have been.

Originally
published Monday, April 18, 2005

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