Recently, WIRED magazine printed an article that listed several environmentally destructive activities that do not directly affect the Earth's climate and may therefore be continued without consequence. Thankfully, this rather foolish article also ran with a counterpoint by Alex Steffan of Worldchanging.com that pointed out that the single-problem, mechanistic thinking that spawned WIRED's article is the same sort of thinking that got us into this climate mess in the first place. The real 'inconvenient truth' is that as long as environmental issues (and most other political issues, for that matter) are treated as discrete problems to be addressed by mechanistic, independent solutions, society will merely continue to move closer to an ecological collapse. A myopic focus on cutting carbon emissions may help to reduce the severity of the inevitable climate shift, but it won't help supply the world's growing population with clean freshwater, slow the catastrophic rate of bio-homogenization, or address any of the other major ecological issues that our society faces. Carbon is only one of six different elements that make up 95% of the Earth's biomass, and we are severely altering the natural cycles of all six of them. Instead of trying to 'fix' our environmental situation with piecemeal technical innovations, each specific to a single issue, we need to stop for a moment and consider all our actions in the context of what we've learned about the Earth's biosphere thus far. In short, we need to restructure ourselves into a sustainable society.
