The Daylight Ride of Thom Hartmann
Author and radio host Thom Hartmann speaks at Town Hall Thursday, July 30, at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $5.
We don't listen to the "radio" but we do know of Thom Hartmann from his analysis of the rise of corporate culture, which is good reading. His Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture, though, got us all stirred up with nowhere to go. (Check out the excerpt on sociopathic CEOs on HuffPo.)
Hartmann's thesis is tidily summarized in that subtitle about the crisis of Western culture. In the book, he identifies three areas--the environment, economy, and population--that we can't seem to get a handle on. He begins in Darfur, quoting a relief worker saying, "If there is a hell, it is much like Darfur." Hartmann sees that crisis as:
...a microcosm of the macro issues we are all facing as the world slides into peak oil, resources (particularly water) run low, human population explodes, and our atmosphere, which has developed a fever, increasingly presents people around the world with many of the same conditions Darfurians and Sudanese face daily.
And his descriptions of the fifteen kajillion horsemen of the apocalypse ganging up on us is truly disturbing: the vanishing topsoil ("more than 50 percent of the world's topsoil is already gone"), dangers of genetically engineered food, loss of biodiversity, collapse of fisheries ("we've already killed off 90 percent of the big fish"), disappearing ice sheets, burning rain forests ("we've laid waste to more than half the world's forests"), rising CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide levels.
And that's without getting into the diseases flourishing thanks to inadequate healthcare and increasing population. The section on the economy will just make you gnash your teeth. Luckily there's a section titled "How Not to Fail," but it's here that the book, in fact, fails. Using Denmark, and the ancient, theoretically peaceful city of Caral, Peru, as guides (and the Maori failure not to kill and eat everything larger than a hamster), Hartmann tries to persuade readers that another way is possible.
Yet those readers can be forgiven for being skeptical--for one thing, Denmark has been around a while, and has not sparked a world sustainability revolution yet--and despite all the research and proselytizing, leadership around the world is going the dig-hole-in-sand, insert-head route. "G8 makes little headway on global warming," reads a Los Angeles Times headline, while others document the G8 food pledge for poor nations, as if global warming's volatile weather patterns had nothing to do with the ability of farmers to grow food.
We asked Hartmann about the distinct possibility that we're screwed already. “Our only option is to awaken as many people as possible, which is the goal of my book!” he told us. We agree, but man, looking around we see nothing but the aggressively sleepy running things.
