Tony Judt wrote a piece in The New York Review of Books called "Is the UN Doomed?" It covers a screed by Eric Shawn called The UN Exposed: How the United Nations Sabotages America's Security and Fails the World, a more positive book by Paul Kennedy, and a cautionary one by James Traub on Kofi Annan. Pretty much everyone has reasons to be disappointed by the UN, while few acknowledge that it does do some good work when given a chance. That's neither here nor there, but the following bit of gloom got my attention:

All in all, then, it seems unlikely that even the humiliating defeat of the Iraq war will change many Americans' minds about the virtues of international cooperation. Something else, however, just may. For there is one common twenty-first-century international experience that American citizens and politicians cannot avoid sharing with the rest of the globe, however little they know of the outside world and however barnacled and prejudiced their views about it. Within the lifetime of many readers of this essay, the world is going to slip ever faster into an environmental catastrophe.

It is no coincidence that the two countries most responsible for this prospect -- China and the United States of America -- are also the two Security Council members least amenable to collective action in general; nor is it surprising that the man they have chosen to suceed Kofi Annan as UN secretary-general is Ban Ki-moon of South Korea, not someone hitherto known for pressing inconvenient agendas or speaking out of turn. His initial pronouncements, notably his equivocation over the propriety of Saddam Hussein's execution, have not been reassuring. But in the coming decades we are going to face "natural" disasters, droughts, famines, floods, resource wars, population movements, economic crises, and regional pandemics on a wholly unfamiliar scale.

Individual states will have neither the means nor -- thanks to globalization -- the practical authority to limit the damage or make good the losses. Substate actors such as the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders will at best be able to apply band-aids. "Acting with others" -- the emerging post-Bush mantra -- will be utterly insufficient: mere coalitions of the willing (or the subservient) will be powerless. We shall be forced to acknowledge the authority and guidance of those who know what has to be done. In short, we shall have to act through others: in collaboration, in cooperation, and with little reference to separate national interests or boundaries, which will in any case lose much of their meaning. Thanks to the United Nations and its various agencies, such as WHO, Paul Kennedy writes, we have already "established international early-warning, assessment, response, and coordination mechanisms for when states fray or collapse." We shall have to learn to apply these to circumstances in which it is not states but whole societies that face collapse or failure, and where even Americans will not have the reassuring option of fighting "them" over "there" in order not to have to fight them "here."

One thing I want to draw your attention to is the quotes Judt puts around "natural" qualifying disasters. One euphemism we have for such events is "acts of God" -- things we ascribe to nature or unseen forces not because we didn't cause them but because we refuse to take responsibility for them. That refusal is above all a political bias. Indeed, the better we understand the science, the more it becomes a matter of political choice, as opposed to mere ignorance.

The problems Judt mentions, and there are more where they came from, are not just unintended consequences of foolish choices, like global warming. Most of them have to do with testing the limits of earth's tolerance for human saturation -- what's known as the planet's "carrying capacity." We've dodged more than a few potential crises along the way, which has swayed too many of us to deny any such threats. The result is that necessary skills -- not just science but the art of cooperation and willingness to make prudent sacrifices -- are being beat to death by the closed minds of the political right.