The role of the media in this issue — (as in others e. g. the NYT and Judith Miller/Iraq, or the Wash. Post burrying walter pincus’ excellent reporting debunking Bush’s prewar lies) — is tantamount to criminal, and you do a good job of highlighting it in your book.

At the end of the day, if we don’t figure out how to force the MSM to be accurate and honest about this issue — as opposed to sensational and “balanced” — we’re toast.

Absent a clear understanding of the nature of the challenge we face, and the cosequences of not acting, we will not act. We may not anyway, but we certainly won’t without an informed populace.

One start might be an massive e-mail campaign to ABC calling them to account for such shoddy reporting. I’m starting now.

What I find surpirsing is this: even though Bill Clinton has “stepped it up” by talking about the need to slow the global economy — given its leviathan scale and, perhaps, soon to become unsustainable growth rate — there remains one problem, the proverbial “mother” of all global challenges, about which Republicans and Democrats, the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe and ordinary people, the corporatists and environmentalists, leaders and followers remain in virtually total denial…. trenchantly unwilling to discuss openly:

OVERPOPULATION ISSUE OVERLOOKED BY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES

http://www.madison.com/tct/mad/topstories/269259

THE CAPITAL TIMES, Madison, WI
Rob Zaleski — 1/25/2008

Thanks for your attention. Comments are invited.

Scientific evidence is springing up everywhere that indicates the massive and pernicious impact of the human species on the limited resources of Earth, its frangible ecosystems and life as we know it.

Guided by mountains of carefully and skillfully developed research regarding climate change, top rank scientists like Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, Dr. James Hansen, Dr. Hans J. Schellnhuber and Dr. Christopher Rapley issued a Climate Code Red emergency declaration this month to leaders of governments and to the family of humanity proclaiming the necessity for open discussion and action by politicians and economic powerbrokers.

From my humble perspective, many leaders of the global political economy are turning a blind eye to human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities that can be seen recklessly dissipating the natural resources and dangerously degrading the environs of our planetary home. The Earth is being ravaged; but it appears many leaders are willfully refusing to acknowledge what is happening.

Because the emerging global challenges that could soon be presented to humanity appear to so many fine scientists as human-induced, leaders have responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, ready or not, like them or not.

Perhaps leadership in our time has too often chosen to ignore whatsoever is somehow real in order to believe whatever is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable, religiously tolerated and culturally prescribed. When something real directly conflicts with what leaders wish to believe, that reality is denied. It appears that too many leaders are content to hold tightly to widely shared and consensually validated specious thinking when it serves their personal interests.

Is humanity once again finding life as we know it dominated by a modern Tower of Babel called economic globalization? That is, has human thinking, judging and willing become so egregiously impaired by our idolatry of the artificially designed, manmade, global political economy that we cannot speak intelligibly about anything else except economic growth and profits without sounding like blithering idiots?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001