Remember those cartoons from the 1960’s — a thinly-inked sketch of a bearded man on a street-corner with a sign that says “The world is ending” and people walk by as if he’s invisible? It’s time to pay attention. In Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture, the bearded and quite sane Thom Hartmann calmly and elegantly spells out how to avoid the impending armagedden. Hang with me here — do you know what blows my mind…?
You’re familiar with Al Gore’s work on the greenhouse effect. And, I’ve been reviewing books in this space that advocate eating raw, eating grains, eating vegetables to lose weight or to heal diabetes. Hartmann says in Threshold that a sudden worldwide shift to vegetarianism”would have more impact on global warming than if every jet plane and car in the world would fall silent forever.” Not to make light of this, but we would also lose extra fat. Talk about a win-win. Healthier people, healthier planet.
That’s one of Hartmann’s thresholds. (By the way, I excitedly told my younger son Justin who has his BS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology those stats — but it was already common knowledge for him.) The second threshold is economic. Hartmann argues there is no such thing as “free trade” — it is costly as hell (my words) for the middle class, not to mention the lower class. I privately “joke” sometimes that we live in the “United Corporations of America.”
The third threshold is population — there are seven-billion of us crowding the planet, while fewer of us grow the food it takes to sustain us. Meanwhile, terrible diseases — for which there is no cure — claim hundreds of millions of people.
Threshold is the social studies book I wish kids would read in school.
Hartmann tells of Denmark whose citizens never worry about their next job, illness, or higher education. Government pays for it. And, he reveals the beautiful story of Caral, a civilization in Peru, that existed for one-thousand years with music and peace.
There are evil-doers in Hartmann’s book — they are the sociopathic CEO’s and deregulation. And he has solutions — one, being to correct a centuries old mistake — revoking corporations legal ability to claim the rights given persons.
Theshold is a remarkably brilliant book. It arrived today, and I was compelled to read it cover to cover the moment it slipped out of the package.
There is no them, Hartmann seems to say, only us.
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