[Oe List ...] Another book

[Herman Greene]

I have just finished David Orr's Down to the Wire. It is gripping and deeply
insightful.

 

 

David Orr's book is about the nature of the challenges that face us and what
needs to happen. Even after reading many books on where we are, Orr's book
jarred me. He made it plain that there are no short-term or easy fixes and
also that there is no way to avoid further, severely negative, decline in
the environment resulting from human activities to date.[1] He says we are
in the period of the "long emergency" and rather than speak of climate
change we should talk of planet destabilization. Adaptation as well as
mitigation will be required. The consequences will also require an overhaul
of our politics, our economies and our ways of living. Our larger task will
be to transform the mode of human civilizational presence on Earth to one
that is coherent with the functioning of Earth (or one could also say, as
Thomas Berry does, to benign presence or to a mutually enhancing
relationship with the other Earth components.)[2]

 

David Orr identifies three tasks for transformational leadership in "the
Great Work"[3] of changing this framework.

 

1.       We will need leaders first, with the courage to help people
understand and face what will be increasingly difficult circumstances.[4]

2.       Second in the "long emergency"[5] leaders will need uncommon
clarity about our best economic and energy options.

3.       The third quality of leadership in these circumstances is the
capacity to foster a vision of a humane and decent future.

 

 

_____________________________________________

Herman F. Greene, Esq.

Greene Law, PLLC

2516 Winningham Drive

Chapel Hill, NC 27516

919-624-0579 (ph)

919-942-4358 (f)

Skype: hgreene-nc

hgreene at greenelawnc.com <blocked::mailto:hgreene at greenelawnc.com>  

www.greenelawnc.com <blocked::http://www.greenelawnc.com/>  

 

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  _____  

[1] Based on my study of the subject, I believe there is little chance that
Earth will avoid a 2o C rise in global average temperature in this century
and it could be more. See, .e.g. , European Environment Agency, "CSI 013 -
Atmospheric Greenhouse Gas Concentrations -Assessment" (April 2008). The
tendency is to see a 2o C rise as a safe target. Orr considers this an
unfortunate delusion. He quotes an email to him from George Woodwell,
founder of the Woods Hole Research Center, which said:

 

There is an unfortunate fiction abroad that if we can hold temperature rise
to 2 or 3 degrees C we can accommodate the changes. The proposition is the
worst of wishful thinking. At present temperatures, which would drift upward
if the atmospheric burden were stabilized now [(which it isn't)], we are
watching the melting of glaciers, frozen soil, and the accelerated decay of
large organic stores of carbon in soils but especially in high latitude
solids and tundra peat. A 2 degree [C] average rise in temperature will be
4-6 degrees [C] or more in higher latitudes, enough to trigger the release
of potentially massive additional quantities of carbon dioxide and methane
[that] would push the issue of control well beyond human reach.

 

In other words, there are going to be massive consequences flowing from
human activity to date, without even factoring in the projected accelerated
emissions and other activities that are now occurring and will occur. No
government or nation is prepared for what lies ahead. Summing this up, Orr
writes: "We are now in a close race between our capacity to change at a
global scale and the forces that we have unleashed." (p.4)

 

[2] This is what Thomas Berry calls "the Great Work."

 

[3] See footnote 5 and accompanying text.

 

[4] To quote Orr again, unfortunately 

 

with a few exceptions, climate change is still regarded as a problem to be
fixed by small changes, perhaps profitably, and not as a series of dilemmas
or as a challenge to consumerism, the growth economy or-in a more abstract
but no less real way-to our institutions, organizations, philosophies, and
paradigms. (p. 6)

 

[5] Orr borrows this term from the book by James Howard Kunstler entitled
The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the
Twenty-First Century. Kunstler's work is also very insightful. 

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