This year's Indian summer has been a real scorcher. A few days ago, when a friend turned up with a face the color of a well cooked lobster, I made a crack about his foolhardiness in going to the beach or the mountains in such weather, only to learn that he had got his sunburn by just making a few business visits about town!

Across the Pacific in the US, things are not easy either. Only days after the flooding of New Orleans, a million Texans were fleeing another hurricane. How ironic that the carbon dioxide pumped out by all the vehicles in those immense traffic jams can only add to the greenhouse effect, which is in part responsible for the severity of the storms they were running from.

This is surely the "technological backlash" that American scholar Edward Tenner refers to in Why Things Bite Back--thanks to improvements in building methods and flood control, as well as evacuation and early warning systems, people have lost their fear of living in low-lying and hurricane-prone areas. But this victory over nature is short-lived, for it takes only a single disaster, like the Indian Ocean tsunami of late last year, or now the floods in New Orleans, to wipe out the toil and dreams of decades at a stroke.

More frighteningly, as the effects of global warming become ever more apparent, extremes of drought, flood, cold and heat will only increase. If scientists' predictions of a 95-centimeter rise in global sea levels over the next 100 years are borne out, thousands of hectares of low-lying land in western Taiwan will be in danger. This year's severe tidal flooding in the south of our island was a stark warning of this.

Although we are well aware that disaster is knocking at the door, we all carry on as before, taking the car whenever we go out, and turning on the air conditioning as soon as we get home. We are just too busy to look beyond our own daily concerns.

This is what is meant by the Buddhist phrase "licking honey from a knife blade"--thinking only of one's own short-term comfort and convenience. In fact, today even the "honey" we enjoy is tinged with bitterness: as oil prices continue to climb, the cost of running the family car keeps on mounting, as do the household bills. But these are petty personal concerns. When one thinks of the predicament of Middle-Eastern countries, with their oil resources the target of covetous powers, millions of innocent people living amid violence and hatred, and the whole world in fear of terrorist actions, one cannot escape the feeling that in using gasoline and electricity wastefully we are accomplices in their plight.

But even if we put all such thoughts from our minds and blithely live our own lives, we have to face the fact that global oil reserves will only last another 40 years or so, and there is only enough coal for another 200 years. The time when oil begins to run out, and its price soars, will also be the time when the effects of global warming will be growing increasingly dramatic. What will the following generations think of us then?

This is the topic of this month's cover story. Since the Kyoto Protocol finally took effect in February of this year, the whole world has been watching to see how things develop. We know that more than half of Taiwan's greenhouse gas emissions come from industry--steelworks, thermal power stations, petrochemical plants--and this situation demands urgent review by government to reconcile the goals of economic development with the vision of environmental sustainability. But for the present, we should look to areas in which we can achieve something ourselves, hoping that the concepts of green living and green consumption can take root among the general public as soon as possible.

If we speak of reform, we should start by reforming ourselves. For the sake of the environment, it is surely worthwhile to sacrifice a little convenience and comfort in return for long-term safety. We can only pray that it will not be too late to make a start now.