p. 226 - 227   (David's first selection, out of six) :-

We now have good reason to believe that even among agencies that are confronting climate change and biodiversity loss, most of the planning is focussed on problems that may not be the main problems created by those phenomena — that, rather, the biggest problems may turn out to be shocking surprises. But even if the phenomenon is recognised and the problem is correctly identified, time and energy may be wasted because of questionable assumptions about the institutional mechanisms that will be used to solve the problem. It's hard enough to motivate leaders to work on the right issues; it'sharger still when the institutions they lead are moving on shifting sands.

In the United States, for example, policymakers spend great energy researching and debating such questions as whether the Social Security Trust Fund will run dry in 2020 or 2025. A small number of people ask whether there will be a US Social Security System by then. Almost none ask whether there will be a viable United States—or if there is, whether it will operate under the same constitution. Anyone who asks such questions risks ridicule. Yet, only a couple of decades ago, when Soviet grain output had reached 210 million tons per year (up from 100 million two decades before that), planners were debating whether their output by the end of the century would reach 290 million or 300 million tons. None dared ask whether there would be a Soviet Union, or foresaw that by 1996, total production from all the land that had been Soviet would have fallen to a famine-inviting 120 million tons. It may have been the right debate, but it was the wrong institutional body. That body no longer is.

It would be presumptuous and naïve to think that we can now foresee events like the Soviet Union's fall, when we couldn't before. If anything, the faster pace of change now may make it harder to see than ever. But we're also higher on the learning curve in understanding the nature of change, if not in predicting the specifics. We know that while the biggest changes can be surprises like the Soviet collapse, the forces that cause those surprises are not out of the blue at all. Once we learn to see the obfuscation, we can detect clear patterns of change, and if we revisit those surprises fit the patterns. The fall of the Soviet empire ... was clearly consistent with a pattern of declining sovreignity of national governments everywhere. Even as the United States basked in its ideological triumph, it found itself with less power to control the course of world events than before.

Other pages:  1  2  3  4  5  6  [Next >>]

The Carbon Gas Spike is described in this excerpt from Chapter 1.

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To read about the book, or get your own copy, go to:
God's Last Offer - Ed Ayres, pub.: New York ; Four Walls Eight Windows - 1999
( or directly from Amazon.com )

Amazon.com says (30 Mar.00): "God's Last Offer : Negotiating for a Sustainable Future, by Ed Ayres;
THIS TITLE IS CURRENTLY NOT AVAILABLE. The publisher is out of stock. If you would like to purchase this title, we recommend that you occasionally check this page to see if it's been reprinted."
( also checked on: 29 April.)

Ed Ayres has been editor of World Watch magazine since 1993. He is editorial director of Worldwatch Institute. He is coeditor of The Worldwatch Reader (W.W. Norton, fall 1998) and Vital Signs: The Trends that Are Shaping Our Future (W.W. Norton, 1993). Founder of Running Times magazine, he was also its editor for fourteen years. He has covered environmental issues for Outside, Buzzworm, The Washington Post, Time, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, and others. His "Notes to the Reader" column in World Watch is syndicated by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.

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