Ari's Planet

If I were a religious man, I might say the following to my fellow Jews on Yom Kippur, when Jews gather to pray and beg forgiveness, when they lament the wrongs that they have done.

On Yom Kippur, our prayers tell us that God will listen to our pleas and, we hope, will forgive us our transgressions against him. It is said, though, that God will not forgive our transgressions against our fellows—for this, we must make amends with those we have wronged. What if those we harm are all creatures, and the Earth, and those yet to be? We are causing the Earth to warm, and to change, and causing the deaths and the ends of many forms of the world. If we do not act to address this within the next few years, but instead allow atmospheric carbon concentrations to increase beyond a critical threshold, then the Earth will suffer massive changes. We may well ruin the Earth for the next 50 generations. Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, but not from the tree of life, and we were banished from Eden for their transgressions. If we do not now change our course, then for 50 generations the Earth may well be turned into a place of "hell and high water", with terrible droughts and heat waves, extreme storms, rising seas, massive extinctions, wars between people fighting for the remaining scraps, and refugees fleeing an ever-changing climate. The creatures we destroy will never be restored and it will take untold years for the vibrant richness we may observe in our everyday lives to flourish once again.

According to the NYT article Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China by John Markoff (1/10/2008), reporting on the discovery by Nart Villeneuve and published on Information Warfare Monitor, China monitors Skype text chats and archives the text and personal information of users whose chats contain various trigger words, such as "Falun Gong" or "milk powder". In the past, the appropriate American response would be something like "Those terrible Chinese! They violate their citizens' rights to free speech and communication! What dastardly dictators!", with the subtext that in America, and perhaps other nations of the so-called "free world", we are better because our governments uphold more noble rights. While such statements about China remain fairly accurate, the subtext has collapsed. The NSA illegally spies on American communications. European countries have taken to archiving, for several months or years, all email communications and record end points of phone conversations.

A little observation from the other side of the world. When I speak with folks back home (that being the USA) they sound like people observing a slowly-unfolding disaster, a train wreck. They can't turn away from the scene of carnage, the news of the latest financial mess, yet they are horrified by what they see. Here in Australia some people think the economy will tank down the road, others seem less concerned. Australia's economy is dependent on mining exports, mainly to Asia and China. When the Chinese economy slows, which it should if Americans stop buying as much Chinese goods, then the Australian economy should also slow, this excluding any other financial effects of the mortgage mess in the US. Everyone in the world seems to remember 9/11. In the US, this was the biggest blow to national perceptions that I can recall, and it was characterized in part by people staring at TVs, their images of carnage and pronouncement, iconic pictures of crowds filled with expressions of shock gathered around public televisions.