I Want Future Generations to Know This: Many from Our Generation Never Sold You

I want future generations to know this: Many from our generation never sold you out. We witnessed the truth, kept our eyes open, and did our best to warn our bumbling, myopic, spin-doctored civilization. All the best to you, my heroes. Rex Rex Weyler is a journalist, writer, and ecologist. Between 1974 and 1982, he served as a director of Greenpeace, editor of the Greenpeace Chronicles magazine, and was a co-founder of Greenpeace International. ============================ The End of Eden James Lovelock Says This Time We've Pushed the Earth Too Far By Michael Powell Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, September 2, 2006; C01 ST. GILES-ON-THE-HEATH, England -- Through a deep and tangled wood lies a glade so lovely and wet and lush as to call to mind a hobbit's sanctuary. A lichen-covered statue rises in a garden of native grasses, and a misting rain drips off a slate roof. At the yard's edge a plump muskrat waddles into the brush. "Hello!" A lean, white-haired gentleman in a blue wool sweater and khakis beckons you inside his whitewashed cottage. We sit beside a stone hearth as his wife, Sandy, an elegant blonde, sets out scones and tea. James Lovelock fixes his mind's eye on what's to come. "It's going too fast," he says softly. "We will burn." Why is that? "Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return." Sulfurous musings are not Lovelock's characteristic style; he's no Book of Revelation apocalyptic. In his 88th year, he remains one of the world's most inventive scientists, an Englishman of humor and erudition, with an oenophile's taste for delicious controversy. Four decades ago, his discovery that ozone-destroying chemicals were piling up in the atmosphere started the world's governments down a path toward repair. Not long after that, Lovelock proposed the theory known as Gaia, which holds that Earth acts like a living organism, a self-regulating system balanced to allow life to flourish. Biologists dismissed this as heresy, running counter to Darwin's theory of evolution. Today one could reasonably argue that Gaia theory has transformed scientific understanding of the Earth. http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0907-33.htm [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on September 11, 2006]

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I Want Future Generations To Know This: Many From Our Generation Never Sold You

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