While the high-level climate talks pursue their stately progress towards some ill-defined destination, down in the trenches there … - Gwynne Dyer

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It is very hard to be brave," said Piglet, sniffing slightly, "when you're only a Very Small Animal. " Rabbit, who had begun to write very busily, looked up and said: "It is because you are a very small animal that you will be Useful in the adventure before us.

Gwynne Dyer

While the high-level climate talks pursue their stately progress towards some ill-defined destination, down in the trenches there is an undercurrent of suppressed panic in the conversations. The tipping points seem to be racing towards us a lot faster than people thought.

People, Progress, Racing, Suppressed, Trenches

Same Author Quotes

The first and most important impact of climate change on human civilisation will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply. Eating regularly is a non-negotiable activity and countries that cannot feed their people are unlikely to be reasonable about it.

Climate, Country, Eating, Impact, People, Reasonable

Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. (Do the right thing even if the heavens fall. ) It's not nearly as naïve a maxim as it seems, because in the real world it often turns out that doing what is morally the right thing is also, in practical terms, the right thing to do.

Fall, Heaven, Heavens, Naive, Real

Take the year a country first reaches 50% literacy and add one or two generations to allow the idea to sink in and, democracy, more or less automatically, appears.

Allow, Country, Democracy, Idea, Ideas, Years

Now, for the moment, we are safe. The only kind of international violence that worries most people in the developed countries is terrorism: from imminent heart attack to a bad case of hangnail in fifteen years flat. We are very lucky people--but we need to use the time we have been granted wisely, because total war is only sleeping. All the major states are still organized for war, and all that is needed for the world to slide back into a nuclear confrontation is a twist of the kaleidoscope that shifts international relations into a new pattern of rival alliances.

Alliances, Back, Country, Rival, Sleep, War

For most of history, war has been a more or less functional institution, providing benefits for those societies that were good at it, although the cost in money, in lives, and in suffering was always significant. Only in the past century have large numbers of people begun to question the basic assumption of civilized societies that war is inevitable and often useful.

Civilized, Functional, Money, Numbers, Past, War