by Lucinda Ulrich
Daily Lobo columnist
I used to think my dad was the real Chicken Little, hiding out in different towns, his true identity kept secret by the Witness Protection Program.
My dad could put a damper on any social event by talking about how the sky was falling, or more specifically, how carbon dioxide was being trapped between the Earth and its protective atmospheric layer of ozone, thus creating what we now call the greenhouse effect.
When faced with my father's inevitable desire to discuss things of importance at weddings, birthdays and any other inappropriate time, many people would close their ears and avert their eyes, not wanting to think about anything so catastrophic.
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Hopefully, my version of the plummeting sky won't be so poorly received.
America, like a child, has a nasty habit of naively caring only about the present - ready to run into the street at any moment, completely unaware that there is a large semi barreling toward them.
That's what parents are for, and, it would seem, the Chicken Littles of the world. It doesn't always make them popular.
Every person alive on the planet is paying for this lack of foresight. Unable to engineer and organize an appealing alternative to fossil fuel automobiles even though the scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades, although hybrids are finally taking off, we are now reaping what we have sown - our own form of mass apathy and ignorance.
Popular opinion, at least in my close-knit group, is that the wealthy nations didn't want anything interfering with their profit margin and therefore felt justified to buy up or crush any patents remotely related with creating a cleaner planet. I guess big business interests don't understand that it's difficult to make money if you don't have any customers.
Humans seem to think they are superior to animals, but I don't know of any mammal that would do anything to destroy its own ecosystem like humans have been doing for almost 100 years. Animals, unlike humans, don't defecate in the nest.
I only hope that my father is wrong and it's not too late to change our ways and pull out of this mess. But I have to admit, I'm not that optimistic. My last visit with my dad wasn't very uplifting. We were at dinner in beautiful South Beach, Fla., and suddenly my dad made a grand gesture to all of the restored art deco buildings and said, "See all this? Someday all this will be underwater."
I know my dad wishes he was wrong about the melting ice caps and the rising temperatures - 2005 was the hottest year on record - or the global impact of a mass transit system that is unappealing and inefficient.
I'm sure he wishes someone else, like a certain Emperor in New Clothes, was right about his denials that there is anything wrong for a change. Even in these uncertain times, we can dream.
