Saturday, February 04, 2006

thee dickhead soh faar

From an intelligent article by historian Simon Schama on the decade referred to as "the noughties":

There was the teeny matter of the beginning of the end; of planet Earth, that is, the last chance of reversing the irreversible damage that has been done to the ecosystem, beside which all the rest of its problems were small potatoes.

Short of taking the current president of the United States by the scruff of the neck and dunking his head deep into the rapidly melting Arctic ice cap, what more did the Earth need to do to make someone listen to its cry for help? But this was the decayed decade, when everything that urgently needed to be done to reverse carbon emissions was identified, documented, articulated - and then systematically obstructed by the power that was disproportionately responsible for the damage. When the rest of the world shouted "Emergency", America chanted back "Growth".

The decade when coral reefs turned pallid and died; when Alaskan caribou butted their heads against pipelines; when what seemed like a marginal rise in oceanic temperatures translated into hurricanes that ate entire shorelines, was also the decade of the Hummer.

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