What is to be done?
Climate change and species loss can no longer be ignored. Its cause is a nearly 700 percent increase in human population in the last two centuries combined with economic ideologies and practices that exploit the planet for profit. Response to climate change will involve fundamental cultural adjustments.
Nineteenth-century czarist Russia provides an example of how difficult that will be. As an agricultural society of landed nobility and serfs, Russia failed to compete successfully against smaller European industrial states. "What's to be done? Who's to blame?" became the mantra of its thinking classes. Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina (1878) served as the country's Gone With the Wind, acknowledging that pastoral Russia couldn't survive. Society split between those whose position depended on existing institutions and those who demanded sweeping reforms. When the czarist regime criminalized radical reform and initiated pogroms against Jews, guilty advocates of change, it left little option but revolution. Karl Marx provided the justification and blueprint, World War I provided the opportunity.
Today, industrial society faces similar circumstances with regard to climate change. The country is dividing between those whose position, wealth and being are defined by the past, and those who believe fundamental reforms are essential to a sustainable future. The Trump administration denies climate change and the GOP resolutely gerrymanders and disenfranchises those who might be inclined to address it. So far the issue is still mostly contained within an embroiled political arena, but congressional stalemate neither saves the past, nor prepares for the future. What's to be done?
DAVID SIXBEY
Flippin
The actual moon shot
Like Ralph to Alice Kramden: "Bang, zoom, to the moon!" Vice President Mike Pence wants to send us to the moon. SpaceNews.com reports that Pence wants to land on the southern region of the moon for scientific and economic strategic value. Of course, there is the military value of going to the moon. Perhaps the U.S. could establish a moon base to monitor activity on Earth. The U.S. could also harvest a collection of moon rocks to use as weapons against its enemies. Large rocks could be blasted from the surface of the moon and be placed strategically in space so as to threaten the enemies of America.
What would happen if the U.S. used meteoroids as weapons? Many scientists believe the dust and debris thrown into the air from multiple meteor strikes would cause a greenhouse effect that would increase our planet's temperature to the point that most life on Earth would quickly die off from starvation, suffocation and contaminated water. However, some humans would manage to adapt and thrive, which would allow the surviving political and military leaders to re-educate and reform the human race.
These events might work out pretty well for Mike Pence, who will likely be our 46th president, and, maybe, the first commander-in-chief on the moon.
GENE MASON
Jacksonville
Editorial on 05/13/2019