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Call for a Meeting of Minds

There are almost 200 nations in the world, as we count them, right now.

The 200 nations in the world have begun to recognize that the way we cut and slash and burn our economies is turning the world into a hothouse, which threatens all of us.  We have almost no idea how to survive in a hothouse.

Almost 200 nations have just met in France to try to agree on what to do to about global warming.  In global politics, that is an a capella choral response.

The GOP (Grande Olde Partie:  American Republican Party) wants nothing to do with global warming frivolity.  They are too busy stemming the movement of human beings from one place to another.  "Go back to where you came from!"  That sort of thing.

Most of the warming seems to be due to our use of fossil fuels:  coal, oil, gas.  Most experts agree that we have to cut our use of those hydrocarbon fuels, and shift as much as we can to other energy sources.

Here in southern Arizona, a significant part of our economics is dependent on open pit mining.  Anyone who has ever seen the consequences of open pit mining knows that an abandoned mine makes the far side of the moon look like a nature park.  There is a glorious piece of Arizona just south and east of Tucson that is the next proposal for an open pit mine.  "Well, you know, it is all about jobs!", people say:  jobs, and polluted water and air,  and wildlife destruction, and free enterprise.

It is a cancer of the human soul.  It is suicidal.

As a human community, we lived through a revolution from hunting and gathering to agriculture.  We lived through a revolution from agriculture to industry:  factories, steam power, fossil fuel use, and all that.  We are in the midst of a crisis caused by how good and mindless we became at a carbon-based industry.  We are trying to grapple with our own revolution, and we had all better attend the meeting of minds.


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