Vital Lies, Simple Truths [antikvár]

FOREWORD w, fe live at a particularly perilous moment, one in which self-deception is a subject of increasing urgency. The planet itself faces a threat unknown in other times: its utter destruction. Whether that death be the quick one, from nuclear war and the catastrophic changes that would follow, or the slow ecological one, from the inexorable destruction of forests, arable land and usable water, the human capacity for self-deception will have played its part. Consider the rapidly growing ecological deficit—soil erosion, shrinking forests, grasslands turning to desert, depletion of the atmosphere's protective ozone layer, and the poisoning and drying up of water tables. Our habits of consumption, on a worldwide scale, are destroying the planet's resources at a rate unparalleled in history. In eflFect, we are destroying the planet for our own grandchildren, simply by our heedlessness of the links between how we live and the eflFects on the planet. The virgin rain forests of the Amazon, for example, are being destroyed at an incredible rate, to make room for cattle to graze. Those cattle are raised, in the main, to feed the world's hunger for beef How many hamburgers does the destruction of an acre of virgin Amazon jungle yield? We do not know: the answer could be determined, but that bit of homework has not been done. And that is the point: we live our lives oblivious to the consequences for the planet, for our own descendents, of just how we live. We do not know the connections between the decisions we make daily—^for instance to buy this item rather than that—and 11