Think 40%.
As far as percentages go, is 40% good, bad, or indifferent?
40% of what, you ask.
Okay, let’s say you see a sale sign that says “40% OFF” on something that you’ve been intending to buy. Is that a good deal? Would you run in and get it, thinking that you got yourself a bargain? Most people would say that 40% off is a pretty hefty savings. Wouldn’t you agree?
What if your auto-mechanic told you that your car’s engine is only running at 60% of its potential power? That is to say that 40% of your engine’s capacity is damaged and/or ineffective. Would you say to yourself, “Well, a 40% loss is tolerable; I am content to drive a car whose engine is only running at 60% capacity”? Or would you want the mechanic to fix the problem?
How about a 40% salary increase or decrease? In that light, is 40% a large, medium, or small percentage?
What about in medical terms, considering a healthy organ versus an unhealthy one. If you lost 40% of your lung capacity, or kidney function, or heart function, would you feel the difference? Would you still consider yourself a completely healthy person? My guess is that, yes, you would feel the difference and, no, you would no longer see yourself as a completely healthy person. Indeed, my guess is that you would become alarmed and worried about the state of your health if indeed you lost 40% functioning capacity in any one of these organs—lungs, kidneys, or heart.
That being the case, why then does it not bother us that, to date, we have lost 40% of the Amazon Rain Forest?
When I was a kid, I remember learning that the Amazon forest in South America was the largest rain forest in the world and should be considered to be something like the lungs of the world. I never forgot that image. The Amazon rain forest is the lungs of the earth, yet we now placidly receive the news that 40% of it is gone—for good? What’s wrong with this picture?
And this is just one fact, one piece of evidence among many others that we humans are doing great damage to the earth’s eco system—glacial meltdowns, dying coral reefs, expanding deserts, and once pristine water resources becoming unfit for consumption and/or drying-up altogether, poor air quality causing asthma epidemics among young children along with other respiratory ailments, etc., etc.
Still we argue. We stall. We doubt and disbelieve. We denounce scientific messengers accusing them of being Chicken Little crying that the sky is falling, so that we can go on about our business as usual.
Yet this one figure, 40%, shouldn’t that be enough? The Amazon Rain forest is now only at 60% of what it used to be—and this is happening within my own lifetime. I was born in the fifties. I don’t know about you, but this worries me, and I think that it should worry you too.
President Obama is at the World Climate Summit Meeting in Paris. How much concern do we have here, as United States citizens, with respect to the world’s climate change? If we are naïve enough to think that it is no big deal and really not a problem, we are fools indeed.
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