"We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."  
Albert Einstein
I am getting up there in age and I am no where near as healthy as I once was so I don't want to argue and fight with people.
I am no scientist but I know that when I was a boy in Germany we used to have a lot of snow, my mother says they hardly have
snow there any more.

Here in Dallas it seems to me and many other people I talk to, that it gets hotter sooner and stays hotter longer than it used.  Plus
that we are running out of water.  

While people can argue about whether Global Warming is real or not I'm not sure we can argue with the statement that the human
race does have the ability to positively or adversely effect the environment.  I don't mean we can do irreparable harm, the anti
Global Warming crowd disagrees and rightly so with the notion that man can do irreparable harm.  In the words of George Carlin
"the earth can shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

We can cause the extinction of many species, as we already have and we have the definite ability to cause our own extinction.
Many of us in the west don't realize it doesn't take much for a group of circumstances to occur simultaneously where life as we
know it can be altered forever.  We  have seen this recently when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, when Rita threatened
people were stranded up and down Highway 45 in Dallas with resources, running out of gas stranded, it was a near catastrophic
event.

We had a storm blow threw several years ago and thousands were without power, by the time they got our power on we hadn't
had electricity for five days.  All the food we bought the day before the storm was ruined about $200.00 worth.  It was in the
hundreds during the day, staying inside was miserable, my wife and I worked but the kids had to go outside and hang around on
a blanket in a shady spot all day.

Unfortunately most of us think somebody else must be working to avert any future large scale catastrophes and tend to not
bother with thinking about the possibility of something going wrong.

But think if something big happened what it would be like to have to endure what the people in the Superdome were faced
with, we already saw how a major agency dropped the ball.  Never mind all the collateral arguments if you or I had to endure a
break down of society it would really suck, many residents of modern cities have watched as their life style deteriorated rapidly
because the infra structure fell apart or disagreements turned neighbor against neighbor or even brother against brother.
In the 70's Kabul was a relatively modern city, Sarajevo was beautiful in the 80's when they hosted the Olympics, and Baghdad it
too had a modern infra-structure.

Mankind must if it wants to survive change the way it does things and the way it thinks.  Yes as we over tax this planet with the by
products of our existence we must consider what we are headed towards if we don't life will be very very different in the next
several decades.   
The Galaxy Song by Monty Python

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's
evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central
point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed
there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in
space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.