Canoe: Dim future for life on Earth - study

"'Nearly two thirds of the services provided by nature to human kind are found to be in decline worldwide. In effect, the benefits reaped from our engineering of the planet have been achieved by running down natural capital assets.

'In many cases it is literally a matter of living on borrowed time. By using up supplies of fresh groundwater faster than they can be recharged, for example, we are depleting assets at the expense of our children.'"

This story was widely highlighted in the international press but largely ignored in the US.

Scary stuff to have reality thrust upon you but an international group of scientists. And it is entirely believable. We all know, from everyday experience, that it has become all to easy to overconsume. The Brits and the Yanks seem to think that their "economies" depend upon this overconsumption and thus one should simply ignore that it is for a limited time only at current levels.

Bubba Bush won't let Kyoto get in the way of the American economy. Blair doesn't want to have to pare back the 48 hour workweek in Britain (contrast to 35 hours in France). Bush wants to drill in ANWR, destroying an entire and rare ecosystem for a few days' oil.

This state of affairs seems to lend more credence to the Bush strategy, which reminds me enormously of former Interior secretary James Watts (under Reagan, yeah it's been a while). James Watts was a proponent of industrializing the forests. Part of his argument was "The world is coming to an end soon, anyway."

The Bush administration is fairly close to another group of this sort, the "Left Behind" group. These folks are also proponents of the end of the world and they are making a mint selling this "upbeat" vision. The idea, much like the Social Security privitization scam, is that "you" can go to heaven after the end of the world even if everyone else is going to hell. And what better way? But the "Left Behind" series of books. And believe! (And pay, of course!)