In the Guardian on Friday, Bill McKibben published an essay:
…Because the one thing we've never really imagined is going to the supermarket and finding it empty.
What the events reveal is the thinness of the margin on which modernity lives. There's not a country in the world more modern and civilised than Japan; its building codes and engineering prowess kept its great buildings from collapsing when the much milder quake in Haiti last year flattened everything. But clearly it's not enough. That thin edge on which we live, and which at most moments we barely notice, provided nowhere near enough buffer against the power of the natural world.
We're steadily narrowing the margin. Global warming didn't cause the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Miyagi coast, but global warming daily is shrinking the leeway on which civilisation everywhere depends.
Toles makes pretty much the same point today, with his sharp pencil:
Toles is funnier. But with his words, McKibben shows a way out of this mess, though I expect his ideas are already familiar to my readers. The solutions are known: it's the changing that's difficult.
Kit Stolz 