My father-in-law is a wise man filled with wise thoughts. When I volunteered with The Climate Project he thought of something H.G Wells wrote almost a century ago in An Outline of History.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
Education or catastrophe — Is that really what our collective existence boils down to? Maybe.
OSLO (Reuters) – Thirteen percent of Americans have never heard of global warming even though their country is the world’s top source of greenhouse gases, a 46-country survey showed on Monday.
Or maybe not. For every one of those 38 million Americans unaware of the danger humanity faces (and our responsibility for it) there is a person working to solve the problem.
People like Majora Carter at Sustainable South Bronx who understands that a clean environment makes for healthy communities. Or bajillionaires like Vinod Khosla who is trying to encourage progress through enterprise here in America and around the world in India.
Our future is not simply a race between what we know and the consequences of what we don’t know. There are a lot of very smart people who’ve made very not smart decisions to put us in the mess we’re in.
No…. Human progress is a choice between hope for something better and indifference.
I choose to hope– to believe –that we can solve our biggest challenge and protect that bright bend of atmosphere that holds us all together.
I bet you do too.
So let’s get to work.