Don’t Worry, Someone Will Fix This Too It is often said that man is God's divine and intelligent creation, to believe this you would also have to be blind and ignorant to every inch of modern creation. Humans are the only creature capable of not only killing each other, but destroying every life form on this beautiful planet in the process. We are somehow convinced that this modern age is the future and, in turn, the only way of life, when in fact we are so close to everything falling apart “We will not believe that this is happening to us” (Kunstler 540). The historians of the future (if there are any) will likely look back at writers like Alfonso Roamano De Sant’ Anna, James Kunstler, Nicholas Kristof and laugh that no one took their writing seriously. Each of their has a constant theme of environmental awareness. It is time for man to look around at his playground, for we have long forgotten the childhood game “clean up” that we once knew. If you spend some time asking around most people will believe they are well informed on the current global crisis and will tell you all about global warming. Global warming is crisis no doubt about it, “If Greenland’s ice sheet melted completely, that alone...would raise the oceans by 23 feet”(Kristoff 530), but that is just not grasping the depth of the issue. Surely there is more to it, positive feedback loops, deforestation, growing deserts, international conflict, growing populations, food shortages and that pretty much wraps it up... right? Oh and the whole energy crisis thing. Start talking about gas prices and most people will complain about the rising cost but are convinced that the problem is either going to fix itself, or be fixed by someones brilliant new idea. If you are old enough, maybe you will be lucky enough to be gone before anything happens. But there will be a generation to face it, Affonso Romano De Sant Anna said in his Letter to the Dead “each generation, full of itself / continues to think / that it lives at the summit of history.”(lines 43-45) for the generations to come there will be no summit, fall is closer to the correct word. The United States reached its oil peak of 11 million barrels a day in 1970 and since then has dropped below 5 million barrels a day. Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day (Kunstler 535). If you are a thinker you will ask “how does this work?” and the answer, well it doesn’t work. So the next assumption is “alternative fuels”, sorry but this is the sick joke society has pushed over its heads, “No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run american life the way we have been used to running it”(Kunstler 536). At this point the often and unfortunately blind optimist will say “ah but you forgot about renewable energy?”:
Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with “renewables” are also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only the