We need that same gut understanding of our environmental situation if we are to take the giant steps we must take soon. It took the emotional shock of seeing police dogs rip the flesh of protestors for white people to really understand the day-to-day corrosiveness of Jim Crow. I used to wonder why my parents’ generation had been so blind to the wrongness of segregation they were people of good conscience, so why had inertia ruled so long? Now I think I understand better. In a 1999 New York Times op-ed piece on climate change entitled “Indifferent to Planet Pain,” Bill McKibben, wondering why the ethical dimensions of global warming were not more widely understood, writes: Yet even some of the most obvious ethical dimensions of emerging global environmental problems are only dimly seen by most rarely are they part of the public debate. These new threats raise critical new ethical questions for the human race. These problems include global climate change worldwide loss of biodiversity, forests, and wetlands long-range transport of toxic substances decline of coastal ocean quality and degradation of the world’s freshwater and ecological systems. As a result, serious new environmental problems have emerged on a global scale.
During this time of dramatic population growth, the human impact on the planet has increased significantly, not only because of the huge increase in our numbers, but also because of the new technical power to dig deeper, cut faster, build larger, and traverse more quickly great distances in automobiles, trucks, and planes. By the year 2050 it is expected to have grown to between nine and ten billion people. In 1950, the world’s population was 2.5 billion people.
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