For years I've talked about how if you think of the planet, Earth, as a living being, and all the different species of plants and animals on the Earth as the differentiated 'cells' that make up that living organism, then what do you call a type of cell that reproduces without anything to keep it in check and creates great scabs of concrete, glass and steel on the skin of the living Earth that exude poisonous fumes and extend long tendrils of concrete and asphalt endlessly out from scab to scab? In my mind it would be fair to describe it as cancer.

But this analogy is not perfect. It fails in two ways. The first is that if indeed we, the human species, are a cancer on the living planet, we are different from cancers in ourselves in that we are simultaneously capable of being this cancer and of being aware of ourselves as such and therefore potentially capable of doing something about it. In other words, we have a choice, to continue being this cancer or not.

The other difference is that in the case of a cancer in us, if even with all our high tech medicine we are unable to cure ourselves of this cancer, then we, the host, will die. In the case of the planet, on the other hand, if we don't succeed in 'curing' ourselves of this cancerous attitude, then the victim of the disease will eventually be us, the human species. And the planet will not miss us. She will go happily on spinning around herself and around the sun, repopulate herself with newly evolved species and quickly, given a cosmic scale of time, reach a new balance.

So, we had better get it right and do it soon. Not like the 'heads of state' that gather for worldwide environmental conferences who in spite of giving lip service to the problem, rather than really striving for a solution spend their time jockeying for position in order to take advantage of the situation for the 'sake' of the countries they represent or possibly even for their own personal career gain. For this reason, it is no surprise when they fail to come to any agreement, and when they do, fail to meet the goals they 'commit' to. And so we continue in our headlong rush, like lemmings over the cliff, to self extinction.