I'm so sorry to hear that, Bec.

However, I'd like to add something that I find relevant in this discussion about climate change. When the Australian wildfires were at their worst about a week ago or a little more, all major Swedish newspapers featured big articles and scary pictures of the devastation in Australia. If you picked up a major Swedish newspaper, you would almost certainly find something about the Australian fires on the front page. When you turned on your TV for the news, the situation in Australia was often the first news item to be presented.

Precisely because of the discussion about climate change that I have been very actively taking part in here on these boards, I was very interested in how American newspapers would present the fires and how they would describe the causes of it. I found, to my horror, that American newspapers wrote extremely little about the Australian fires, as if they were really no concern of America's and as if American people had better things to worry about. I got the impression that a person in America can be fairly well-informed, in the sense that he or she can try to find out what is going on by reading (American) newspapers and watching the news on American TV, and still know extremely little about the horrible fires in Australia.

Something that truly worries me wshen I read American newspapers on the web is how insular America seems to be. And because of America's huge impact on the world, that national introversion is a real problem to the world, to all the rest of us, and in the end, to America itself.

I get the impression that America thinks of itself as a different planet, a world all unto itself. What happens in other parts of the world does not concern you very much, unless some part of the world seems to penetrate your world and actively attack you, like Al Qaida. When that happens, you will take action and strike out into the world to deal with that particular problem. But why should you care about problems in the world that don't threaten you?

One of the first things President Bush did during his presidency was declare that the United States would not be part of the Kyoto protocol. During most of his presidency, America made no international commitments to reduce its emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Bush also did not try to enforce any federal regulations of the emissions of major pollutants in America.

The American position has been something like this. Are the international problems that might be caused by climate change in any way caused by or related to America? You can't prove that they are. And since you can't prove it, America has nothing to do with it. Do the wildfires in Australia threaten America? No. So why should America care about them?

When I was a kid in the sixties and read Superman comics from that time, there were often pictures of Superman flying in space and looking back on the Earth. When you saw the Earth from space in the Superman comics, it always looked the same - you could see North and South America, but no other continents. It was always like that. I noticed it, but I thought to myself that if Superman had been a Swedish comic book, then no doubt Europe and Sweden would always have been prominently visible when the Earth was seen from space in the Superman comics.

But the problem with America is that it still sees the world that way, the way it was shown in the comic books from the sixities. Only the Americas can be seen. And of course, only the United States of America is of any real importance.

No wonder, Pam, that you would think that the wildfires in Australia were caused by environmentalists preventing the necessary clearing of undergrowth in the forests.

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Australia? What Australia?

Ann