Word: planetful
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...glide beneath you at an elegant, stately pace. But you're actually going so fast that the entire map of the world spins before your eyes with each 90-minute orbit. After just one or two laps, you feel, maybe for the first time, like a citizen of a planet...
...colors and patterns you see--the visible evidence of the complex working of the natural systems that make our planet habitable--seem both vast and precise, powerful and yet somehow fragile. You see volcanoes spewing smoke, hurricanes roiling the oceans and even fine tendrils of Saharan dust reaching across the Atlantic. You also see the big, gray smudges of fields, paddies and pastures, and at night you marvel at the lights, like brilliant diamonds, that reveal a mosaic of cities, roads and coastlines--impressive signs of the hand of humanity. Scientists tell us that our hand is heavy, that...
...longer believe that we can wait for all the scientific data needed to answer these questions conclusively. We must recognize immediately what it means to be citizens of this planet. It means accepting our obligation to be stewards of the earth's life-giving capacities. As homeowners, we wouldn't neglect or damage our houses until they weren't fit to live in. Why would we do that with our planet...
...Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro was the last time world leaders assembled to look at how to heal the ailing environment. Now, 10 years later, Presidents and Prime Ministers are convening at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg next week to reassess the planet's condition and talk about where to go from here. In many ways, things haven't changed: the air is just as grimy in many places, the oceans just as stressed, and most treaties designed to do something about it lie in incomplete states of ratification or implementation. Yet we're oddly smarter...
...save--and what we have done a fair job of bollixing up so far--is the earth as we like it, with its climate, air, water and biomass all in that destructible balance that best supports life as we have come to know it. Muck that up, and the planet will simply shake us off, as it's shaken off countless species before us. In the end, then, it's us we're trying to save--and while the job is doable, it won't be easy...