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all right to
you then, |
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| At our little
solution team (solutionteam.org)
we have been allocating a small portion of our time, at a leisurely
pace, to a particular project: since counselling French petroleum
company, Elf Aquitaine, on alternative uses for redundant single-skin
oil tankers in 1990 - we have been tinkering away at something which
"might one day prove useful to mankind, if not the planet". Something
which, in our ignorance, we thought never quite rose to the quality
of emergency of a tyrants war or an earthquake - never allowing it
to trump more in-vogue tragic puzzles, each in its day pleading loudly
to be solved. |
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| We were wrong.
This project, and the enormous threat it was designed to partially
alleviate are the stuff of todays news. The solution we have been
shaping and adjusting, discussing around conference tables, in our
minds and on our laptops: is sound, it will work, it can form part
of a solution. Our shame, as we write this, is the absence today of
the unique infrastructure we always knew had to be in place beforehand
in order to deliver effective help, on time, in strategic locations. |
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| So here we are,
what we saw in 1990 and thought would arrive in the late 21st century
is here already in 2015. The historic calamity we knew for decades
would some day come, did by stealthy advances, arrive, and is even
now delivering itself upon us. To those of us from the original team who can still fight, we say: no more tinkering. Time to clear the decks and sail into the eye of hell. For by our tardiness we are now limited to being able, with luck, to provide a little relief from wretched consequences. |
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| Global warming, rising oceans, drying and shrinking lands; fueled and oiled by human excesses: are driving the life out of this planet, or off it. | ||
Somewhere in the evolution between destroying everything and trying to bring it back to life again man will be compelled to work out how to live and make a community upon oceans. This seems to us to be inevitable. Today dry, poorly governed, warring, starving broke lands are hemorrhage their weak battered inhabitants. We are seeing that when desperation drives them from their homes, they ineluctably head for lands where they are uniformly unwelcome. |
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| We feel it is
inevitable that the number of refugees from forlorn lands will grow
and multiply; just as the number of lands refusing to give them refuge
will also grow: until one day soon there will be for them no safe
or happy place upon our planet where they can find refuge. |
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