A good start.

We need to do this; we need to do better than this. I suggest trying for a 10% set aside in the Senate version–obviously, twice as good, and with the traditional Christian value of being tithing.

We also desperately need to increase the organic matter in soil. Increasing it by 1.6% over all the arable land in the world would sequester carbon equivalent to all that the industrial revolution has produced, according to Allan Yeoman. And switching to perennial bunch grasses for crops and grazing would help sequester it deeper and more sustainably.

For starters, *every* living thing on the planet is a “consumer”. Plants consume water, CO2 and trace elements from the soil to grow. When they die they give them back. Microbes consume, well, whatever it is they eat, etc. The difference between humans and most other consuming creatures is that we have used our technology to divorce ourselves from that part of the natural consumption/growth/life cycle where we ourselves are eventually consumed and so finally give back to the ecosystem what we have taken out of it during the course of keeping ourselves alive and growing and reproducing.

The same use of technology allows each individual member of our species to consume a whole lot more resources than they possibly could have done if we had stayed in our ‘natural’ non-technological state. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that if if we had stayed in that non-technological state, that we would not *still* be consumers. We would be. We would just not be such dangerous consumers from a planetary viewpoint.

It is the runaway application of technology that has allowed us to consume in the unhealthy fashion to which we have become accustomed. It is what has made us a danger to the planet’s life support system. But since no one really wants to give up the benefits of our technology, we have to quickly learn how to re-integrate it and ourselves with that life-support system so that our civilization can continue to exist in something like its current state. If we don’t pull that off, then yes, we will almost certainly end up with the Mad Max scenario.

In addition to all the technological things we are now trying to formalize into global policy to pull off that reintegration (with efforts like Waxman-Markey and the coming Copenhagen summit), there is are the dirty words we are told we must not utter in polite company — controlling population growth — to contend with if we are to be successful and achieve reintegration in time to avert global catastrophe.

So far, we have been using technology to run ahead of the population growth curve, but with factors like peak oil, peak food, peak fresh water and 500 ppm CO2 concentrations looming on the near horizon, it is unlikely we will be able to continue to do that as effectively as we have in the past 30 years (when we consumed and grew ourselves from 3 billion to 7 billion people).

If you remove the word “consumer” from the dialog you just end up obscuring the true nature of the problem. You will be attempting to divorce the method from the madness in people’s minds, when what we really need to do is thoroughly analyze the method and then get everyone to commit to dramatically changing it.

Like any form of conservation, preserving forests is simultaneously easy and hard. After all, saving a forest must be done in perpetuity — it only has to be clearcut once. And there are many short term incentives to cut down a tree.