The other day, 56 newspapers around the world published the same editorial on the climate crisis: an unprecendented event for potentially an unprecedented global emergency.

The editorial — drafted by editors at the Guardian — says, among other things:

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it…

In the U.S., only the Miami Herald ran the editorial, though it deleted a key sentence from it that focused on the particular need for the U.S. to change its carbon-hungry ways. It’s a telling indication of how poorly the message is being communicated when those who need to hear it most aren’t even being exposed to it.

Fred Branfman of the Sacramento News & Review offers a similar argument, in a piece entitled “Copenhagen Won’t Be Enough — Only a ‘Human Movement’ Can Save Civilization from the Climate Crisis” (via Alternet):

Our greatest challenge is to adjust ancient belief systems to the new climate realities that have undone them. If we can break through our fog and clearly see the existential threat we pose to our children, presently unthinkable actions to save them may become possible. But if not, we will remain locked in our cognitive cattle cars, moving inexorably toward the loss of everything we hold dear.

How do we adjust those ancient belief systems? How can we individually do our part in dealing with climate change? One answer is provided in Earth Fever, coming soon from Cosimo Books. In it, authors Jan Paul van Soest, Erik van Praag, and Judy McAllister bring to bear their diverse experience in the fields of sustainability, leadership, and entrepreneurialism on the problem of bringing about the change of consciousness and the new spirituality the endeavor will require. Along with the wisdom of international opinion leaders—including management consultant Peter Senge; Jeroen van der Veer, the former CEO of Royal Dutch Shell; cultural creative Paul Ray; Herman Wijffels, former governor at the World Bank; and others—Earth Fever delves into what is needed to bring about this essential new way of thinking.

Stay tuned for news of Earth Fever’s publication…

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An article in The New Yorker this week about the century-long drive to bring universal health care to American citizens opens with this:

“At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without compulsory health insurance,” the Yale economist Irving Fisher said in a speech in December. December of 1916, that is. More than nine decades ago, Fisher thought that universal health coverage was just around the corner. “Within another six months, it will be a burning question,” he predicted. Oh, well. What’s a century, give or take?

Fisher, an earlier driver for universal health care, was also the author of How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science (mentioned in the New Yorker piece, currently available in a new edition only from Cosimo Classics.

Fisher’s interest in public health was prompted by a bout with tuberculosis — a major menace to public health at the time — after which he wrote this book, published in 1915 under the auspices of the Life Extension Institute. In it, Fisher presents information on deep breathing, the kinds and quantities of food to consume, poisons, the importance of being active, rules of general hygiene, and more. Specific tip cover overweight or underweight, alcohol consumption, posture, tobacco use — and even how to avoid colds.

Irving Fisher earned the first Ph.D. in economics awarded by Yale University, where he also taught political economy. He was an accomplished mathematician and an engaging and talented writer on even the most technical of subjects whose investigations ranged beyond economics to encompass astronomy, health and hygiene, mechanics, philosophy, poetry, science, and myriad public policy issues. He died in 1947, and he’d probably be appalled to discover that affordable health care for all — which every industrialized nation in the world except the U.S. extends to all its citizens, at lower cost and with better results than the U.S. manages — continues to be withheld from Americans.

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