Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again
We’ve all heard the stories in which the ancient Romans sewed salt into the fields of the cities they plundered, making it difficult for future inhabitants to grow crops. While it turns out that these tales are more myth than fact, there is most definitely a tendency for victors to make it hard for those coming later to reverse course.
In fact, this is precisely what’s going on between the U.S. and Iran. In its uprooting of the Obama-era agreement on the Iranian nuclear program between Iran, the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States—plus Germany), and the European Union, the Trump administration is making it very difficult for future administrations to put the deal back into place and restore the balance and security to the region that the world had worked so hard to establish.
Is there an analogy to the environmental damage being wreaked by the current administration? Put another way, is there any sense in which the horrific impacts we’re making on ecosystems, human health, and well-being are permanent? Sure, we’re seeing stronger storms, more erratic weather, dangerous heat waves, rising seas, and large-scale disruption to infrastructure and migration patterns, but isn’t there a scenario under which we cease moving farther down this path, and these processes reverse themselves?
Absolutely. Here’s an article on a so-called “regenerative revolution,” designed to accomplish this very thing. A great deal of thought continues to pour into the subject of picking up the pieces and getting this civilization back on course to sustainability.
Caution: making a plan is one thing; carrying it out is quite another, especially in a world of 200+ sovereign nation states, all busily pointing fingers at one another.
Craig,
I hear your pain ! It’s the pain felt by every well meaning leftist advocate in despair at witnessing cherished delusions being dismantled.
President Obama and before him, President Carter were essentially decent, well-intentioned guys. History will regard them as weak and ineffective Presidents.
Both Presidents preferred “symbolism” and “and appeasement, to brutal reality. Who could blame them ? No one wants to be forced to deal with brutal reality.
History is littered with well meaning, popular, but worthless ‘Treaties” and “Agreements”. Examples abound in Treaties like the “Holy Alliance” and 1938 Munich Agreement. (y’know, the agreement guaranteeing “peace in our time”!) These were also wildly popular, and well received internationally.
President Trump is correct in insisting that an ineffective, weak treaty is worse than no treaty. He may be crude, brash and even brutal, but he’s right! His strong, determined approach may avert Iran’s dangerous desire to develop nuclear weapons.
It may avert a nuclear conflict between Iran and Israel.
Margret Thatcher may have been a little cruel in her assessment of Jimmy Carter when she observed ” if all the world leaders were shipwrecked and saw the sharks coming, President Carter would smile and wave happily, saying “Oh look, it’s Charlie the Tuna come to visit !”
As for Marc Barasch and his ““regenerative revolution”, his idea’s are about as beneficial as his rejection of immunization programs and the befits of fluoride.
Along with his misunderstanding of blockchain technology and bizarre unsubstantiated alarmist theories, Marc Barasch is like so many Eco-babblers, long on theories but very short of any practical solutions are useful activity.