Rod Dreher ties the government's fiscal recklessness to our myopic mismanagement of natural resources:
This is not just an economic crisis. At bottom, it is a moral and spiritual crisis. We Americans have been living as if the historically extraordinary bounty of material wealth and personal freedom are the natural state of mankind. We — and in a democracy, the government is "we" — have been living far beyond our fiscal means for far too long, and punishing any politician who failed to lie to us about the free lunch.
But our disastrous failure of prudence is not only financial. Take the indulgent stewardship of our natural resources.
While we are (rightly) consumed by the perils of climate change, for example, few people are paying attention to the growing topsoil crisis. The world is losing vast amounts of precious, hard-to-replace topsoil each year, much of it disappearing because of wasteful agricultural techniques. Have we become so accustomed to full supermarket shelves that we think they will continue to replenish themselves infinitely, no matter what we do, or fail to do?
John Judis covered similar ground following the earthquake in Japan.
(Photo by Catherine Chalmers via Buzzfeed)
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