While David Roberts, staff writer for Grist, is, at the end of his turbulent flow through the 2010 midterm pipeline, still a positive person at heart—he needed to be, in his own words,”…depressed as hell for a minute.”
In his September1, 2010 article “How bad are the next few years going to suck?” his depression is caused by the very real possibility that the Democrats may lose the House. They probably won’t lose the Senate but, of course, it has been such a “do so little body”, that it rivals the, ”do absolutely nothing Republican Party of No”.
Roberts sees, as many other environmentalists do, a return to the localization of our economies as our salvation: to start thinking in terms of making our local communities better and cleaner. I wholeheartedly agree, from the bottom up is where we’ll win out.
I am old enough to remember that, as a child, I could walk to the grocery store; there was one in every neighborhood. This could be again; what wasn’t produced locally could be delivered to our communities by nonpolluting generated electricity powering electric trains. The local deliveries could be made by battery powered vehicles, recharged with nonpolluting generated electricity. If your local store was a little far to walk to, you could drive there in your battery powered car.
This decentralization will be fought tooth and nail by most capitalists, and, I fear, most American voters will support them until it is too late to make the needed changes. If they were the only ones involved I would say, reap what you sow.
But, unless changes are made now, the rest of us will suffer the same fate: physics will eventually correct the unbalance for the earth but humankind and many other species will only inherit the wind.
