Mother Nature doesn't give a crap about our moral imperatives. She doesn’t care if people we judge to be worthy (the poor, the persecuted, the people of colour, the handicapped, the fashionably oppressed) should be lifted on to our lifeboat, only if it is overloaded. And whether the passengers live together without class barriers or in feudal subjugation is of no concern to nature either. The laws of physics trump the laws of any Holy Text, ethical system or left-wing manifesto. If we want to survive, we will have to play by nature's rules, not ours.
After fruitless and protracted negotiations between the Human Social Justice Union and Mother Nature, U.N. mediator Hoo R.U. Kiddun has booked off. His decision came after the HSJU reps and Mother Nature failed to hammer out a deal in the latest of enumerable all-night bargaining sessions. “The parties are just too far apart”, Kiddun remarked, “To come to an agreement, there has to be some give and take on both sides, but it seems that for 250 years Union members have been doing all the taking and Management refuses to continue giving.”
You may think that “austerity” is a hoax. A conspiracy of bankers and CEOs and neo-liberals to rob of us our rightful entitlements. But you obviously haven’t heard the news. This is not the 1930s. This austerity is not contrived. This austerity is for real. This austerity is geologically, not ideologically rooted. There is not enough real wealth to go around. 
"(There is) a fatal bias of the publishing world toward optimism. It is a bias that is commercially rewarding because it panders to our cultural and neurological need for false hope. The problem is, while optimism may be a good coping strategy on a personal level, it could be a calamitous approach for humanity to take on a collective level. If the crises we face are as challenging as the science indicates, we need first to fully understand how challenging they really are, as opposed to what we are comfortable with acknowledging. In other words, we need realism, not optimism. Before there can be a ‘call to action’, we have to understand the scope and nature of the problem we want to solve." Tim Murray
It seems that we are under the impression that Mother Nature will award us points for effort. If we do our best and try living less unsustainably, she will forgive us our sins and let us stay in the game because, well, surely she realizes that we are something special---and should get special treatment. But the truth is, this lady is not for turning. She is one 'hard-ass', a referee that cannot be swayed by our histrionics or our pleading. We have got to understand that she has her own schedule, and will not hold up the train for us. 
In September 2008 Ecuador became the first country in the world to declare constitutional rights to nature, thus codifying a new system of environmental protection. How about it, Australia?
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