We also are facing global warming. Alas, it won't provide much impetus for the United States. We're not only the ones most mired in our own consumer comfort, we're the ones who don't really believe in multinational action that curbs the freedom to pollute. We're the nation that created a Marshall Plan after World War II to rebuild our enemies' shattered economies, yet haven't the foresight to help build the structures to rebuild the shattered climate on which our lives and futures depends. This has become a Teflon environmental issue.
All concern simply slips off.
All is lip service. We are wary of any foreign entanglements that do not redound to our capitalistic, geopolitical way of seeing things. As a nation, we haven't the forum, we haven't the mind-stretching moral vision, we haven't yet the first evidence of global catastrophe that would cause us to gather, to debate, to counteract in order to create other ways, ways that start with our total interdependence on one another. As a family of faiths united with others of faith universally, we do have a forum. The forum opened in Assisi in 1986 when the World Wide Fund for Nature for the first time in history brought the five major world religions together to declare how their faiths lead them to care for nature.