Journal #1: State of the Planet

Quebec lake

Over the years I have done a lot of writing. Too much perhaps. Anyway, in the early 1990s I took a program called "Global Transformation Studies" at OISE (Toronto). One course required a journal. Over the next weeks, I will post a few excerpts from there. Here is the first:

My initial reaction to rereading the "state of the planet" is one of disbelief. It can't really be all that bad. After all, twenty years ago, the scientists were telling us that the worlds" resources would be exhausted by the end of the century. (Dennis Pirages and Paul Ehrlick, Ark II,W.H. Freeman & Co, 1974). et we seem to be going on with "business as usual." Then I listen to a CBC news report a couple of days ago: the last virgin forest in North America is opened to logging, the entire fishing industry of Newsfoundland (Newfoundland!!) has to be dimantled, there is a hold over Antarctica as big as the U.S.A. All in one news report.
The planet may be able to regenerate from our destructiveness - though there is no assurance of that. The critical issue for us as humans, is that we may not survive the process! When I read about how the CFC's operate in the stratosphere, it is frightening. We don't really know what we have unleashed!
...
Can we let go of the addiction to privilege? Can the Third World free itself from the encroaching enslavement to the same dream? Can we return to an earlier vision of our place in the scheme of things? - which is never really just a return but a reinventing of the old in an entirely new and transformed setting.   (to be continued...)