I don't recall what the last blog I wrote here was about but I want to say the world has reached the point of no return.  In the early 1970s, we environmentalists warned the world that if things did not change, we would soon reach a point of no return.  That is, we would irreversibly change the planet.  In reality, that had already occurred.  The ball was already rolling by the time I was in college.  Now, 45 years later, it is too late to return to the world of the 1970s.  The planet is warmer and going to continue warming until many coastal cities are flooded.  Soon, there will be no wild elephants, tigers, whales and many other large bodied species.  The world as I knew it is ending.  The world's nations are still fighting what I called "The first of the great resource wars" in Iraq that started in 1991 and has never really stopped.  It is flamed up twice, in 1991 and again in 2003, and is about to flare up again.

"There are too many of them," said our regional rare species manager for the US Forest Service.  The solution?  They delisted most of their rare species.  Rare species management has become a useless effort as the world roles toward a biological collapse and massive extinctions we are already starting to see.  Why?  There are too many people and most of those people consider their personal well being of a greater concern than the health of the planet.  We need 1/2 acre of farmland for each person.  Because only 5% of the earth is farmland, we need 10 acres per person.  Currently, we only have seven.  I remember a US population of 200 million.  It is now 307 million, the same as China's in the 1930s.  In the 1970s we told the US that lawmakers should make us a world leader in limiting resource use at a time when we, the 5% of the world living in the US, used 25% of the worlds resources.  We said, "If the rest of the world uses resources like we do, then growth is not sustainable.  Now, we need 4.5 earths to support our demand for resources. 

So, you can thank my generation for this problem.  Instead of looking for cures, we have elected a congress that puts its head in the sand as if resources are inexhaustible and many of whom claim global warming is either not happening or not cause by humans.  Too late.  The only course ahead is what we call "mitigation:" dealing with disaster after the fact.