When will we realize it’s too late?
Yesterday at lunch the talk turned to why the government won’t acknowledge our environmental and energy problems and do something about it while there’s still time. Why can’t we realize that fossil fuels are going to run out and do something about it now? Why can’t we see that there is a serious global warming problem, a worsening pollution problem, world-wide water and food shortages on the horizon, and of course growing world poverty. Why can’t everyone agree there is a problem and work towards fixing it?
Of course it’s not politically important for our leaders to ‘fix’ a problem before it is believed to exist....there’s no glory in it. For them, it’s much more powerful to wait until the general population is crying for a solution and then step in and be the hero. But when will the general population agree that these problems exist?
I was reminded of an activity that Population
Connection does in its teacher workshops (one of my many hats is as a facilitator for the organization). It’s a great analogy for the population explosion, but the theory behind it works for anything that is rapidly increasing in a mathematical proportion.....
There is a bottle of liquid with one bacterium in it. Like all bacteria, these need some food and a bit of space to live. This strain of bacteria multiply by division at the rate of once a minute. So, one bacterium becomes two, and two becomes four, etc. to the extent that at midnight the bottle is completely full and the bacteria are doomed to starvation.
When was the bottle half full?
(uh-huh....one minute before midnight)
If you were a bacterium in this bottle, when would you first realize that you were running out of space? (these are cognizant bacteria of course)
Yep....too late.
I hope we’re smarter than cognizant bacteria (remember I’m talking about the general population!). But it sure does feel like it is almost too late now.
7:59:56 AM 
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