Fleecing the Earth
By Nadya Zhexembayeva
In my years of leadership development work I used to tell my clients a story about a town with a bridge. The gist of the story is that there is a town, whose livelihood depends on a bridge that connects its parts over a river; and one day the bridge develops a crack. The town is very small, the resources are limited, and people still need to get over to the other side of the river, so they keep walking across at their own risk. After a while, the crack grows, and people start falling into the river, causing a rescue frenzy among the town’s few rescue workers. As the time progresses, more and more people fall into the water, and more and more resources are pulled to assure they are rescued safely. After all, it’s a tangible immediate need, isn’t it?
As I re-tell this story, the absurdity of its plot stares right into my face. Anybody would get it: the bridge needs repair – even if it is a long term solution to an immediate problems. And then I hear the NBC Nightly News story about the Alps glaciers melting due to global warming (well, I am not sure I can use this term, as apparently it is still not a proven scientific “fact”). The entire tourist industry built on skiing and other snow sports faces immediate jeopardy; and guess what is the top solution business is investing in? They are wrapping glaciers in fleece. Wrapping. Glaciers. Fleece. Sounds like the old bridge story, doesn’t it?
B·A·W·B·Log Feeds
February 10th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
That reminds me on another story:
“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it…”
A. A. Milane, Winnie the Pooh (1926)
February 17th, 2006 at 12:14 am
Headline news today on msnbc.com today had the following to say:
Satellite observations indicate that Greenland’s glaciers have been dumping ice into the Atlantic Ocean at a rate that’s doubled over the past five years…. read more at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11385475/
How much ice needs to melt before we can move global warming from theory to fact?
Maybe we should start investing in fleece….
February 17th, 2006 at 12:17 am
Headline news today on msnbc.com today had the following to say:
Satellite observations indicate that Greenland’s glaciers have been dumping ice into the Atlantic Ocean at a rate that’s doubled over the past five years…. read more at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11385475/
How much ice needs to melt before we can move global warming from theory to fact? Who gets to make that decision?
Maybe we should start investing in fleece….
February 17th, 2006 at 7:55 am
If it weren’t so sad and absurd, this would be laugh-out-loud funny.