Let’s Not Get Triumphant Just Yet
In 1968, General Westmoreland announced that we could finally see “the light at the end of the tunnel” in Vietnam. That announcement has come to define a paradigm: the tendency of leaders, military and political, to declare victory long before a conflict has actually been resolved. An editorial in the influential international scientific journal Nature in February of 2007 was in fact entitled “Light at the End of the Tunnel.” It was part of Nature’s Climate Change special edition, and it warned that the world-wide acceptance of the reality of climate change brought with it new perils: business and political leaders were starting to announce what steps they were taking to combat the problems of global warning as if the problem were solved, when in fact the solutions offered were not nearly enough to solve the problem. -more-