Finally a man has spurred up the courage to remind mankind that we are facing a dangerous crisis as no other in recent times. Al Gore, the former-vice-president of the United States has gone public, raising his voice to the world, alerting all to the awareness that we are facing a planetary emergency provoked by a climatic crisis.
For the first time humanity has recognized the existence of a concrete threat to its survival, but we as a society have lost the habit of analyzing and arguing the really important issues. Before the advent of television people talked to each other, they attended lectures, read more and they thus acquired a deeper vision of reality.
Nowadays they have become conditioned to the fast style of news headline presented on television with brief and neat information, showing the facts without analyses and without presenting the causes. People are in a rush and content, easily satisfied in knowing what is happening around them without great interest in the why’s, even less still if they have to read, which for many represent sacrifice and a waste of time.
Al Gore shows what is happening to the climate: global heating and the consequent melting of earth’s glaciers, the eminent risks to the water supply, and the alteration of the marine currents that cool down and heat up the continental plates. He also shows that everything has a lot to do with the brutal carbon discharge into the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels and forest fires, which provokes the rise in temperature leaving the air unfit for breathing in our larger cities. He also shows the light in which our leaders think as to what they think as being important today, as there are a lot of economic interests involved. Leave tomorrow to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, they can solve the problem.
Certainly the former American vice-president has followed his intuition, his inner voice telling him that is necessary to act to save the planet, because if nothing is done in the following ten years, we will no longer have a means to revert the process of Earth’s degradation. In a few years water will become a serious problem in many countries. Now there is also a greater increase in natural catastrophes and for many tomorrow has begun to be an uncertainty. What will happen to the Planet? What will become of our children?
Humans have stopped listening to their intuition. Einstein said that in order to understand the working of nature, the employment of the intuition is indispensable. Thus, by only using the intellect, humanity has not yet learnt how to use the energy contained in the atoms correctly. Nuclear energy could now take mankind to a new point in progress, but we have just managed to use it at a very high cost and at incalculable risks.
Even in facing a planetary emergency the intellectual human, aided with just his brain, does not act quickly enough. He finds the need to quantify by calculating the costs, and establishing the return of his investment capital. Securing the terms that guarantee the survival of the species, is not a motive sufficiently strong enough, he first needs to establish the profitability of the capital. Nevertheless, this is just one of the many incoherent aspects that human civilization should face with sincerity, by defining its priorities and goals in order to reach lasting progress and avoid extinction.
Benedicto Ismael Camargo Dutra