Re: The girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes

I note that she's David Suzuki's daughter. Interesting guy, interesting work. No wonder :)

However, now I'm afraid that I have to step in and get cynical.

She claims to speak on behalf of future generations, but does so as though all present concerns must be shared by the future. She speaks on behalf of those who live in poverty as if the will to share were enough to create the resources and to carry them across borders. She addresses a multigovernmental body and asks, effectively, for the abolition of governmental divisions.

Much of the environmental damage we see is the result of the development of those resources, in the past and in the present. We can ask that nations voluntarily cut back their use of fossil fuels and chemicals by not shipping food far away or growing it inorganically; and all become organic locavores. But I doubt that those starving in Somalia want to hear that they should utilize local resources.

And yet, we also know something her schools don't want her to know in their environmental lessons; that no great famine for over a century has been anything other than political in nature. The UN exists to preserve its Nation States. But within those sovereign nations dissident populations have been starved to suppress them.

Can we ask the growing populations of the third world to not cut forest for agriculture as the Old and New World did when they leveled the uninterrupted forests that covered their continents? Can we ask them not to build cooking fires in numbers large enough to be a major contributor to global pollution.

From long before the felling of the Cedars of Lebanon, all building has come at a cost.

However, it is now that those very Northern Countries who she claims are greedy have developed the technology to be able to limit the costs of building those resources, as well as the cultural perspective necessary to assess the losses. Its their children who can be taught to fear for the future and for others.

Unfortunately, another thing we have learned is that war is a great destroyer and waste of resources; even those wars created to spread the "benefits" of civilization.

The irony is not lost of her speaking to the poor in Rio's slums and coming to the conclusion that wealth inequality is a North/South thing.

Sustainability within present resources demands that burgeoning populations be allowed to die-off when they grow past that. The technology which allows people to expand beyond their limits is a byproduct of freedom. And "civilization" cannot be imposed by warfare.

Very few of us want to revert back to level of sustainability which involves living off the land. Even fewer, who can see the damage want the accompanying lack of perspective which blinds people to the damage they're doing.

Nobody "wants war." And yet we keep asking for solutions to be delivered by Nations who built and defend their existence through warfare; and which, increasingly, are the most destructive to their own.

Dante