Wake Up, Earthlings: your hair is on fire.

If there were a huge comet hurling toward the Earth, there would be 24/7 coverage on every network. If there were ANYTHING humanity could do to turn it away, it would be done.

Guess what. There is a huge comet hurling toward Earth. It's called Global Warming.

Planets get destroyed for any number of cosmic reasons. How appalling to have ours destroyed by apathy, greed, and disbelief .

I wonder what on earth today's children will think of my generation, and their grandparent's generation, if we leave them with a world of sinking cities, devastating storms, melting polar icecaps, baking droughts, all because we were too cheap, and too enslaved by the oil and auto industry, to produce electric cars and solar-powered buildings.

Three dangerous attitudes that work against saving ourselves:

1) "Oh, these guys are all alarmists; this will never happen." The mass of evidence suggests that it not only WILL happen, but it IS happening. And philosophically, why wouldn't the planet die, or become uninhabitable, if it's abused? We have tons of galactic evidence that planets change and/or perish all the time. Why not this one? Everything changes continually, and everything ends. In this regard, humans and the planet Earth are in the same boat. The Vulcans are not going to come and save us OR the whales.

2) "The Rapture is going to come and save all Christ's chosen people, so we don't have to worry about all that environment stuff." If you think that no educated sentient being could possibly believe this, you do not live in west Texas.

3) "I can't afford to worry about this. I have to get to work in my car everyday. I don't have time to go live off the land." Neither do I. I can't afford a new hybrid car and I can't run out and build myself a solar-powered off-the-grid house either. But we CAN do the following things. We can educate ourselves, so that we know the actual gravity of the situation. We can tell everyone we know about it - family, friends, students, church, sangha, pagan gathering, book club, tea party, card game, whatever is "community" for you. And, once we've all done that, we can put financial and political pressure on the people who CAN do something about reducing dependence on fossil fuels QUICKLY - now - not in some la-la future. Here's a start: stop voting for morons.

If 200 million people in this country all really believed that the world was facing a vast planetary catastrophe, we would be acting as though our hair was on fire.