THE DAILY IMPACT

The tide of mortal threats to our industrial society continues to rise — as is well documented in today’s Sunday papers — while the leaders and the institutions that are supposed to preserve. protect and defend us indulge in distractions. (Whether it’s a hike on the Appalachian Trail or a rant about Socialized Medicine, it’s a distraction.) Meanwhile, the tide rises:

The Congressional Budget Office this week issued a new report on the national debt (little noticed in the furor over its cost estimates for “socialized” medicine) that reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s observation: “When I reflect that God is just, I tremble for my country.” The debt continues to skyrocket, faster than the Gross Domestic Product. “To put it bluntly,” the New York Times [“The Debt Tsunami”] observes, “the fiscal policy of the United States is unsustainable.” There’s that word again. It means we cannot keep doing it. If we try — if we allow our representatives to refuse to raise taxes, cut spending and fix health care — then we will find out the bad way what unsustainable means.

Various cheerleaders for the Way Things Used to Be pretend to see the end of the recession coming. But the end of the recession does not mean a return to what we used to think of as normal. People are showing a strong tendency to save money, drat them, rather than buy stuff, and that means that a great many people who lost their jobs in the past year are not going to get them back. Bob Herbert writes in the Times [“No Recovery in Sight”] that the official unemployment rate has reached 9.4 percent, much worse than recently predicted, and is headed for ten percent. And according to on study, the underutilized workers — who want full time but only get part-time, or who want jobs but are too discouraged to even look — now total nearly 30 million, the highest number in history and the highest rate in a quarter century.

We who worried about the dramatically increasing reproductive problems in frogs and fish used to endure a lot of ridicule. Now, not so much. [It’s Time to Learn From Frogs,” Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, again.] Because the problems are now occurring in humans, in the form of genital deformities in infants and declining sperm counts in adult males. The culprit? In all probability a class of widely used industrial chemicals called endocrine disruptors, meaning they interfere with the infinitely complex system that manages our bodies’ growth, functioning and reproduction. These chemicals are everywhere — in agricultural chemicals, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, cleaning compounds, children’s toys, food storage containers, furniture and carpets, computers, phones, and appliances. Only now has it occurred to some to research their long-term effects, and the results, just starting to come in, are horrifying.

Scary stuff, but remember the main thesis of BRACE for IMPACT: saving the world is not possible, but you and I can save ourselves — can start living sustainably — at any time we choose.