A Father’s Day essay on the world we’re leaving our children

On the one hand, should I be blogging on Father’s Day?  On the other hand, what more important day is there to blog on climate change than Father’s Day?  So as a compromise, I’m doing some cross-posts and reposts.

Last year, Salon published my Father’s Day essay. It was a sequel of sorts to “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“  Sadly, it needs to be updated since, of course, we didn’t pass a climate bill and thus took a quantum leap closer to leaving our children a ruined climate.

As parents, we constantly admonish our children to share with others. The joke is that as adults, we hardly like to share anything at all. Who likes to lend out their car? Or their tools or books? We’re so worried they won’t come back in the same condition — or won’t be returned at all.

But the truth is that the people we like to share the least with are our own children. “We do not inherit the Earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children,” the saying goes. Right now, though, we’ve borrowed the entire Earth, trashed much of it, and don’t plan to give back the rest of it.

We are plundering the world’s “renewable resources” — arable land and tropical forests and fisheries and fresh water. And we are using an ever-greater fraction of nonrenewable energy resources, especially hydrocarbons, with devastating consequences.

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DIAMOND: There are so many societies in which the elite made decisions that were good for themselves in the short run and ruined themselves and societies in the long run….

Similarly, in the United States at present, the policies being pursued by too many wealthy people and decision makers are ones that — as in the case of the Mayan kings — preserve their interests in the short run but are disastrous in the long run.

Jared Diamond, author of the bestseller “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” has a fascinating video discussion of climate change.  Below is the video and a blog post on it by WWF’s Nick Sundt.

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Margarito Adame unloads California farmed hybrid striped bass into an ice container near Mecca, California, to be shipped for market  [SOURCE: AP]

As world population and prosperity increases, so too will the demand for fish, and we won’t be able to meet this demand solely with fish caught in the wild. Aquaculture will no doubt continue to play a role, as CAP’s Michael Conathan explains in this CAP cross-post.

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