The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse.

The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse.

Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice growing river deltas of Asia will be under water. There will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refuges. The word that comes to mind is chaos. If we cannot mobilize to save the Greenland ice sheet; we probably cannot save civilization as we know it.

Our early 21st century civilization is in trouble. We need not go beyond the world food economy to see this. Over the last few decades we have created a food production bubble-one based on environmental trends that cannot be sustained, including overpumping aquifers, overplowing land, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.

Humanity's greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest.

Socialism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth. Capitalism may fail because it couldn't tell the ecological truth.

No civilization has survived the ongoing destruction of its natural support systems. Nor will ours.