The Cost of Indifference

Over at The Intersection, Sheril Kirshenbaum has a brief post about The Forecasted Collapse of a Fishery. This unnecessary tragedy reminds us, as if any reminder should still be needed in 2010, that the ramifications of our own past actions are increasingly forcing us to deal with a very changed world. Some intrepid author might even give it a catchy name, like Eaarth.

One of the fundamental changes is a new (or simply newly recognized) urgency about finding broadly acceptable ways to keep individuals from doing specific things that have unacceptable consequences. We have many laws and regulations now, of course, with a subset devoted to reducing or eliminating some forms of pollution. But we’ll need many more, with some way of restraining carbon emissions being the most urgent and most obvious example.

In other words, we have to realize that we really don’t live on a planet with infinite resources or infinite sinks for our waste, which has been the operational model of much of our activity throughout human history. We will have to find ways to measure and manage[1] virtually everything we do, not out of some starry-eyed, utopian vision of How The World Should Be, but simply because the unflinching facts tell us it’s in our own best interest to do so.

We have to get beyond the cynical, childish, and breathtakingly selfish view that, “there’s no profit in saving the world for future generations”, and find a path to, dare I say it, a more enlightened world view.

[1] Hence my summary of the Metricene, “living measured lives on a managed planet”.