Inside WWF Philippines

Finally the Bush administration, which is not on my list of reliable leadership, admits that climate change is real, happening now and Katrina was probably one of the first signs of change. But, predictably, they are opting for voluntary emissions reduction, afraid to threaten their economic hegemony. While the UK and Europe, and perhaps even China and India shift to renewables, the US will fall behind, still trying to curb their addiction to fossil fuels. Their resistance to shifting now may well be their achilles' heel because in the future, focus and funds will increasingly be towards putting out the ‘fires’ from climate upheaval, immensely straining resources all around.

The term for organizations such as WWF is ‘non-profit’ or ‘non-governmental’ with a lot of ‘nons’ to express what these organizations are not, rather than what they are. The reason for this terminology is that non-profit, cause-oriented groups are a relatively new phenomenon, emerging around the beginning of the 20th century. For-profit or corporate entities were established from 15th century mercantilism as a legal entity for joint investments with the purpose of profit. Non-profits emerged in response to a failure in the way society was structured and kept their negative nomenclature, maybe to remind us of the gap, the lack, the unfulfilled social promise of nations to their citizenry.

My reading for Labor Day weekend was the Weather Makers by Tim Flannery. This book is definitely a must read if you are at all interested in climate change, which we all should be because it will affect all our lives, and definitely the lives of everyone we know today who are under 50 years old.

It’s a drama that plays out over and over again, the main characters changing only slightly depending on the situation and the place. Like a Greek tragedy occurring in real life, the tensions are between the laws of man and the laws of the gods, in this case, the laws of nature.