Tuesday, March 20, 2007

about an inconvenient truth

Caught all but the opening minutes of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth on television the other night. He was preaching to the choir. What I don't understand is why more people such as Gore and others trying to warn us about global warming don't talk about the history of the Middle East, northern Africa and Easter Island. All three of those areas were once very productive parts of the globe and had rather large populations of well-fed people. The Cedars of Lebanon mentioned in the Bible and in the Gilgamesh Epic were real, not just metaphors. Then they were cut down and the environment deteriorated. North Africa was once heavily forested, but when the trees were gone, the land turned for the worse. The people of Easter Island destroyed their trees and the economy and the population of the island went with their forests. We're doing the same thing on a worldwide scale. And our burgeoning population is not making things easier but putting pressure not only on the environment but on the sheer numbers of their neighbors. We're going crazy.

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