Salvaging the World, Introduction

This will be a discussion of what's wrong and how it might be fixed. When introducing the founder of the Sierra Club, David Brower, many years ago at Ohio University, I listed what was going wrong with the world as we then knew it, topics like

Desertification
Loss of species
Loss of habitat
Global warming
Overpopulation
Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
Trashing the earth and the seas, as with plastic detritus
Poisoning the environment, as with DDT or Chlordane

There were more topics, but by the time I got done listing them in my introduction, David Brower had discarded his speech, and instead he spoke brilliantly on several of the topics I had introduced, extemporaneously. The Sierra Club had been among the first environmental organizations in the U.S., and Brewer had been profiled as the Arch-Druid by John McPhee in a book about three of the movers and shakers of modern society. At the time he spoke at Ohio University, not long before his death, Brewer was being ridiculed as yet another ridiculous "tree-hugger," but now, in 2008, environmentalism and global warming are respectable terms, and environmentalists like Al Gore win the Nobel Prize (while still being reviled as tree-huggers by those who have no interest in saving the world).