fires, hurricanes & droughts, oh my . . .

I don't mean to be flip with the title of this entry but it seems that the environment, "nature", is definitely showing its nasty side in the news these days. As I write, the number of evacuees in southern California due to the wildfires is creeping toward a million, the Army Corps of Engineers is thinking of buying up homes in hurricane devastated areas of Mississippi, and Georgia has been facing record droughts and imposing emergency measures . . . What doesn't seem to be being put together all that well in the mainstream media is the fact that all these tragedies are somehow connected. While I would hesitate to lay all these tragedies at the foot of global warming, I can't help but think that they are the result of our inability to come up with development patterns that are more consistent with natural realities and constraints. Furthermore, if global warming is the most glaring example of this inability, it looks like things are getting worse instead of better.

So what to do? . . . well, for starters I think that we need to start admitting to the fact that our environmental problems are not the product of random chance and that we would do well to start behaving in ways that reflect that we are part of the system, not above, beyond or immune to its rules. This is old news. There are hundreds and thousands if not millions of people that know and understand this fact, and have been saying so for decades. Where we fall short is getting billions of people, as well as leaders and institutions to start acting in accordance with a few simple truths: 1) we are part of a natural system 2) our current actions and development patterns are having profoundly negative effects on said system 3) that system is in trouble 4) the evidence (see above) is right before our eyes.

Anyway, I'm sure that the few people that read this don't necessarily check it for missives on environmentalism but I had to get that off my chest, seeing as how I felt that it was a rather glaring point that hasn't been stressed in the news over the last week, although CNN and their Planet in Peril series, I'll admit, seems to be very well produced. In other, Coastopolis related news: I've been working on giving the current "placeholder" sites a little bit of a facelift so that the page has a bit more of a presence and a better description of what I'm trying to do with it. Hopefully those will be able to be published by the end of the week. Stay tuned.