Planet Of The Year: What Is Wrong With Us?

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There is an old science experiment in which a frog is put into a pan of water, and the water is slowly heated to the boiling point. The frog sits there and boils because its nervous system will not react to the gradual increase. But if you boil the water first and then put the frog in, it immediately jumps out.

We are at an environmental boiling point right now. Is the destruction of one football-field's worth of forest every second enough to make the frog react and jump out of the pan? What will it take? If, as in a science-fiction movie, we had a giant invader from space clomping across the rain forests of the world with football field-size feet -- going boom, boom, boom every second -- would we react? That's essentially what is going on right now.

We saw the two whales trapped in the Arctic ice, struggling for air, and the world responded. The U.S. and the Soviet Union cooperated. Yet we see 40,000 babies starving every day, and we don't react. What is wrong with us?

There used to be a debate in the '70s about appropriate technology. Now the question is: Did God choose an appropriate technology when he gave human beings dominion over the earth? The jury is still out. And the answer has to come in our lifetime from the political system.

There are precedents. We made human sacrifice, once commonplace, obsolete. We made slavery obsolete. These things, just like changes in weather patterns, took a long period of time. But now, just as climate changes are telescoped into a very short period of time, changes in human thinking of a magnitude comparable to the changes that brought about the abolition of slavery must take place in one generation.

We know how to solve the problem. It will be unimaginably difficult. The cooperation required will be unprecedented. But we know what to do. What is required is a change in thinking and a change in the equilibrium of the world's political system.

Right now the political equilibrium is characterized by short-term policies at the expense of long-term policies. It is characterized by actions to confer national advantage at the expense of actions designed to promote global advantage. It is characterized by preparations for war, ignorance and starvation.

Our challenge as political leaders is to come up with an agenda of solutions, which we are doing. But the larger challenge for all of us is to shift the world's political system into a new state of equilibrium, characterized by more cooperation, global agendas and a focus on the future. As General Omar Bradley said at the end of World War II, "It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of each passing ship."