The End of the World As We Know It?

By Jane Smiley, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted October 28, 2006.

There aren't many tyrants in history who can truthfully say they put the entire future of civilization at risk just to make a buck -- but Dick Cheney can.

In a week or so, the New York Review of Books is going to publish an article by James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis (in which the Earth is viewed as more than an ecosystem, closer to a living being, that can be healthy or diseased, and can change, through evolution, from one state to the other). Lovelock will declare that the Earth's temperature is about to rise five to eight degrees centigrade (depending on where you are -- more at the poles, less in the tropics), and that this temperature rise will have disasterous consequences for all life, eventually, for example, reducing the human population from six billion to two hundred million, mostly living in the far north, and, as another example, submerging the British Isles, creating out of the highest points of land an archipelago, where some, but not much, habitation will be possible. As for the western United States, done for, along with much of the rest of the world, and civilization as we know it, of course.