Why Sustainability, not Terrorism, Should Be Our Real Security Focus.
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004799.html
by Alex Steffen


What really threatens us? How do we truly make ourselves safer?

The Cato Institute (a conservative thinktank) has released an
outstanding paper, A False Sense of Insecurity (PDF), which makes the
point that in any rational assessment, terrorism is really just not
that big of a threat to the average person. For instance, about as
many Americans have been killed by terrorists as have been "killed
over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe
allergic reaction to peanuts." What's more, many WMD threats are
overblown and largely preventable. Indeed, with exhaustive research,
the authors can conclude that:

     Assessed in broad but reasonable context, terrorism generally
does not do much damage.

     The costs of terrorism are often the result of hasty,
ill-considered, and overwrought reactions.

     A sensible policy approach to the problem might be to stress that
any damage terrorists are able to accomplish likely can be absorbed,
however grimly. While judicious protective and policing measures are
sensible, extensive fear and anxiety over what may at base prove to
be a rather limited problem are misplaced, unjustified and counter
productive

We, especially those of us in the U.S., have been kept in a panic
state for the last five years, told constantly that not only is
terrorism an immediate threat to ourselves and the ones we love, but
that it is a danger to our very civilization. The result has been
both that terrorists have been more successful in spreading terror
and that authoritarian politicians have taken the opportunity to
reduce government transparency and citizen oversight and erode
protections for human rights and democratic process.

It also hasn't made us one lick safer, since, while we've been
freaking out, fighting an unjustified war and pouring money into the
terrorism porkbarrel, we've essentially ignored very big, well-
documented threats, from the climate crisis to the weakening of the
global public health system and the rise of epidemic disease to the
destruction of New Orleans.

Meanwhile, what we've been taught about how to respond to real
threats turns out to be not very helpful. Ready.gov is the official
disaster preparedness Site of the Department of Homeland Security.
The Federation of American Scientists analyzed Ready.gov, and found
it so incomplete and poorly done that they felt compelled to create
their own site, ReallyReady.org, to give people better information
about the threats various kinds of terrorist attacks pose, and the
kinds of responses possible (and to call for the government's site to
be improved).

But both of these important efforts miss a still larger point, which
is that much of what is insecure in our societies is also what is
unsustainable about them.

Let me be even more blunt: sustainability is a national security
priority. Perhaps the national security priority. If scientists are
correct, far more people have already lost their lives from the
direct and indirect effects of climate change than terrorism. The
health effects of sprawl, car accidents, chemical spills,
environmentally-influenced cancers: all of these things are probably
bigger threats to the lives of average Americans than terrorism.
Certainly preventable disease, unnecessary hunger, solvable poverty
and environmental degradation already cause far more death and
suffering in the world than any terrorists ever could.

And the things we need to do to alleviate these problems also tend to
make us more secure and our systems more stable in the face of
whatever terrorism might occur: see, for instance, the notion of
passive survivability, which notes that green buildings are safer and
more sustainable, sure, but they also protect their residents more
effectively in an emergency, whether that emergency is an earthquake
or a city paralyzed by a train station bombing. Similar points can be
made, of course, about everything from better public health to green
cars to building bright green cities -- these things bring us benefit
now, they lessen the severity of the dangers facing us, and they will
help make us less vulnerable to the things we fear.

We can build a bright green society, one which will give our kids a
future. We can build a much safer society, one which will increase
our kids chances of growing up healthy to live in that future. By and
large, the steps involved in building both are the same, and none of
them involve color-coded terror alerts. The time has come to stop
living in fear, and start building a better world.
--

________________________________

Tom Atlee * The Co-Intelligence Institute * PO Box 493 * Eugene, OR 97440
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