Is the Jetson lifestyle our best possible future?

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I am watching the Jetsons as I was doing my work and I realized the ideas that I had absorbed as a kid.  Technologybrings us many helpful things, and I am still convinced by it.  However it seems that it would be better if it were more evenly distributed.

Mission: STS-41-B Film Type: 70mm Title: Views...
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Isn’t it kind of strange that we have a phone capable of two way communication and instant ability to transport our senses worldwide, but we can’t cap a leaking oil well?  How can we call ourselves a civilized society when our tools are killing the environment and ourselves?

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.  ~Wallace Stegner, letter to David E. Pesonen of the Wildland Research Center, 3 December 1960

So how did we get into this situation?  Why can we produce all the consumer goods we don’t need, and yet fail on the basic responsibility to the present and future?  Why do we forget the source of technology and not value it?  Is it so hard to make sustainability as important as progress?  What are we progressing towards?  A world with plastic and oil in the oceans, and carbon and smoke in the air?  What are we doing?  I don’t believe it’s too late to stop the destruction and repair the damage, but its going to take a commitment.
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  1. Pingback: Passionate about what in your life? « Chicago Mac/PC Support

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