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One thing we can never avoid is evolution. Every change in the environment, whether removing a mountaintop for the coal inside, or burning that coal, or using the electricity the coal fire produces--will result in some small, subtle, initially denied change in not just humans but every living process on the earth.
And because we shed DNA into space every day and it's whisked who-knows-where by solar winds and other currents as yet unimagined, probably every living process in the universe. Here I would include geologic processes like continental drift, and probably processes we have not even begun to perceive. The eruptions of a volcano in the Aleutians, for example, is known to be affected by the amount of snowfall in a given year because of the weight of the resulting ice on the cone.
It all fits together. We're changing and the things we are doing to resist change are causing things to change faster because we think in terms of a single life-span or in terms of a few decades of life we've experienced so far. We save the mother or we save the baby (this used to be a common ethics exercise) or both without much of a thought as to how this will affect the species or other species. In fact, thinking in larger terms is often discredited as inhuman or inhumane, cruel, unfeeling.
Few of us grew up on farms, so it was a shock to see a turkey murdered on television in the background of Sara Palin's little impromptu press conference. But literally hundreds of millions of turkeys will die in a given week before Thanksgiving and a little less in a given week before Christmas and New Years in circumstances far less loving than displayed on television, hanging from assembly lines by their feet as college-age kids flick their heads into baskets.
Life is nasty, brutish, and short. The more satin pillows we pile on it, the greater our denial, the more out of touch with reality we become, the more schizophrenic or sociopathic we become--to the point that W can claim it was just bad luck that made all these terrible crises happen on his watch and Dick Cheney can claim he is proud of his accomplishments in the same telecast where he admits to authorizing war crimes in violation of the Geneva Conventions, the supreme law of the land.
I think everyone in the Bush administration is on antidepressants and benzodiazepines for sleep. These things weld shut the door to the conscience and make you immune to the very things that moral and decent people fear the most--the voices of your past sins crying out in the night.
