Over the past few years we have come to accept that there is a warming trend on earth. The ice caps are melting, mountain peaks that had been white forever are turning into earth tones. Al Gore and earth scientists from the United Nations received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to raise awareness. I applauded their achievements, having been a member of a high school group called SAVE, Students against Violence to the Environment from 1969-72. The highlight of our three year effort was a multi-activity, all-day seminar attended by delegations from many Long Island high schools.

Now, 35 years later, having lived modestly without an air conditioner until 2003 and without a private car until 2005, I’m being made to feel guilty about the plight of the earth.

I recently read a book which opened my eyes to what is going on here, and has allowed me to look at things differently. The book is called War with the Newts. It was written by the Czech Karel Čapek in 1936.

Čapek painted a devastating picture of the end of the world, as he knew it, just before the outbreak of World War II.

In his book, a mariner discovers a nearly human-sized newt species off the coast of Indonesia. The newts like to eat oysters but can’t open the shells. The captain gives them knives to make eating easier and they let him take the pearls. The knives are also useful in fighting off their only known predator, the shark. Thus, they begin unchecked reproduction, 30 offspring per female every year.

The sea captain enlists the support of a “captain of industry” to help him move newts to other places for the pearls. The industrialist realizes the newts’ potential in undersea construction. Eventually the newts are working for governments all over the world, extending shorelines, closing inlets – in short, making countries bigger. The newt population continues to grow, and the newts, given explosives to help speed up their projects for man, use them to create new coastlines where they can support their burgeoning population. Thus, the newts are employed to create more land, but they begin to destroy land for their own needs.

Mankind will be forced to high ground as the newts gain control of the world.

In the author’s Afterword (”the Author Talks with Himself”), once the newts have mastery of the earth, they will begin to fight each other and then man or some other species will take advantage of the chaos to better its position. On this optimistic note, the book ends.

I have begun to look at global warming from another angle. The worse things get, the more people, and governments, will try to save their own economies, populations, whatever, at the expense of others or the earth as a whole. Thus the Brazilians are chopping down the rainforest and new gasoline consuming cars continue to roll off the assembly lines. Even India is going into production of a cheap car for its billion people.

What if, I asked myself, global warming is not part of the problem, but part of the solution?

We wonder if there is life on other planets. What we mean, though, is life as we know it, based on oxygen. Life as we don’t know it doesn’t interest us because we see it everyday, as something else. Astrophysicists refer to stars as being born, living and dying, just like us. Stars are life as we don’t know it. Planets may also fit into the category. Think of the earth as a living organism. It needs a certain atmosphere to thrive. If it learns that its atmosphere is endangering the welfare of its body, it will take steps to rectify the situation. Thus, the earth determines that human activity is a threat and must be curtailed. Just as Čapek’s newts flooded lowlands to create more coastline for them to breed and live, the earth is flooding lowlands to reduce the human population and restore order through the inevitable chaos.

In today’s world, with the Chinese building a new city every day, the Indians becoming the outsourcing capital of the world with all their English speakers and programming geniuses, the Europeans finally united and as powerful as they were when the Greeks and Romans ruled the Old World, and the Americans still fighting to hold on to the top spot, who’s going to voluntarily go back to horse and wagon and subsistence agriculture?

Not me!