Momentum is a hell of a thing.

As parents why do we spend so much of our time and precious resources in educating, teaching, training and explaining concepts to our children... Because we want them to have a better, happier life and future.

Why as parents do we try to protect our children, especially the younger ones... Because as parents we can see that the consequences of their actions are going to come back and bite them in the ass. They can't, we can.

As awake, aware and intelligent adults we can see further into the future. We can connect the dots. We can predict with better accuracy, the future. Because of this we make sometimes small and sometime larger course corrections. The point is that we don't have to actually meet the consequences to learn, we can simply predict, learn and adapt. This is the evolution of intelligence.

And so it is with the sustainability or social movement, not all of it, in fact just the leading edge. They can see and predict, they have connected the dots. And they can see that the consequences of our behaviour, now, are going to cause us progressively more pain and suffering, tomorrow. And they wish with all their heart to help us adapt.

They see this because they have rigorously investigated, they have done the math. And they get that exponential economic growth, production and consumption compounded by an exponentially growing population, exponentially rising debt and exponentially dwindling resources including the mother of all resources, cheep energy... Are all leading us to a very inevitable and absolutely predictable conclusion.

That life, our life, life on planet earth earth is going to fundamentally change.

But tomorrow is tomorrow, the next moment is ages away says the small boy hurtling toward a very predictable and inevitable collision with a plate glass window.

Momentum carriers us forward even when we stop doing whatever it is that we are doing. Ask the captain of any super-cargo ship. Momentum is a hell of a thing. When we take into account momentum, tomorrow is already here, it came yesterday.

Maybe we should start paying more attention to what those weird sustainability dudes are saying. Forget the right and wrong line of reasoning, rather look at the coherency and data supporting the arguments. It might just be that they care about us more than the industrial-financial complex. Which seems reasonable given that we know for a fact, it doesn't.

But hey, we have time... How much is gas now?

It's not that we need to freak out. Impending crisis or not, freaking out won't help. Rather study, learn, educate, empower ourselves and join the conversation. This is a relevant, intelligent and appropriate response.

And has delightful and unexpected rewards that benefit us now.