To Late to save the world

Sometimes I wonder if it is to late to save the world. We are caught up in so much commercialism and buying. Buy, buy, buy, and it never quits. We are always upgrading ourselves. Better everything. But the world is going to hell in a handbasket rather quickly.
Do you think it is to late to save the world, is it even possible?
This is a great concern of mine, being as I have children (even though they are grown).
I know it takes everyone to work on this, but not everyone is willing. How do we really change things?

From what? Consumerism? Why?

No its not. Things are as they ever were, better than in the past even.

Well Zaimless, I worried it was too late and looked into growth, sustainability, bio-mass depletion, pollution distribution, etc. back in 1980, and it was pretty clear. The only hope was to reverse the trend, but next best hope was to level off, third best hope was to stabilize the growth's acceleration. We are now 25 years hence, and I have heard some claim that there was a year or two in there when we did not grow by more than the previous year. So we're on the throttle, and have buried it for a quarter century. See ya.
I really wish they would have listened to Chief Seattle in 1844:

'The earth is not their brother but their enemy. They conquer it and move on. They will devour everything and the earth will become a desert.' Chief Seattle, 1844.

Really then how come every summer in Toronto smog alerts become more frequent and more severe?

Disclaimer: I am not a subscriber to any sort of fatalism of any sort.

[edit on 3-2-2006 by sardion2000]

Its more like the world is going to hell on the back of a snail. People are complacent when they're comfortable. It takes an abrupt and large scale shock to motivate the masses into action. Its like the analogy of boiling a frog: if you throw a frog into boiling water it will jump out but if you put a frog into cool water and slowly heat it the frog will wait patiently until it dies. Its the same as the idea that the Iraq war could not have happened without 9/11, unfortunately with the case of our planet, things tend to work very slowly.

I don't believe that the world needs saving, and if it did, doubt we could save it, though I am often wrong. In time, any damage we have inflicted on the world will heal. But, as for our current state, and the direction that humanity is going, I see us as being very near the end of the line. We can't slow down, and we know it. We have been consuming beyond an unsustainable level now for at least 25 years, and have yet to level off, let alone decrease our speed of destruction. So, my logical deductive reasoning tells me that if we can't stop ourselves, the laws of supply and demand will. The law of the jungle apply to us just as much as they apply to the rise and fall in the populations of the caribou and the wolf pack. When too many wolves eat too many caribou, the herd cannot sustain itself, and as a result the wolf population crashes due to starvation. If humans think that we can somehow ignore the laws of nature and not get caught, I feel we will learn otherwise. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. My only question is when? I am curious to see if the mayans really were that good at predicting things, and hope I'm around at 11:11 AM, 21/12/2012, or Baktun 13.0.0.0.0 on the mayan long count calendar.

I have wondered this for a long time. What does it take to really wake us up? Are we so wrapped up in the commercialism that we don't seem to care. Why are we doing this to ourselves? Isn't pollution like smoking, we wait till some horrible disease sets in before we do anything about it , and then it's too late to change it ?