Being an optimist by nature, there's a danger in believing that silver linings can be found everywhere in the narrative of our collective stories.
Even in the face of disaster, the journalistic bent is to uncover feel-good accounts of those who somehow survived against all odds.
The remarkable tales of earthquake victims trapped for days under rubble who survived, or the wilderness hiker pinned under a boulder after a landslide, who cut off his own arm and drank his own urine to save his life.
But the gloom and doom of our continued negligence of the environment is hard to spin in a positive manner.
While we'd like to pat ourselves on the back for the advances we've made toward greener lifestyles, the truth paints a far bleaker picture.
We are poised to leave of sordid legacy for future generations, the product of our collective preoccupation with short-term horizons.
It's what plagues global leaders, the kind that gather at G8 and G20 Summits, who may agree on some measures to combat global warming and other environmental problems. But they are handcuffed by the self-preservation that's inherent in politics.
However, blame can't be placed solely on the shoulders of elected officials. Most of us have short-term horizons and think in terms of, at the very longest, our lifetimes. We're not overly concerns about what happens after we're dead, or who's left to clean up the mess, although having children sometimes helps us to look at things differently.
If we really cared, we'd be far more aggressive in decrying the impacts of our way of life, evidenced in our polluted water, soil and air — things basic to human existence.
We'd be more concerned about the scourge of oil-consuming automobiles, biotechnology's bent to replace native seed species, and agriculture's fatalistic factory farming methods.
It certainly seems like were on a suicidal path, poised to make good on a cryptic Cree prophecy: "When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money."
We do have legal structures in place to help delay what appears to be an inevitable apocalypse-like collapse of modern society, but legal ramifications need teeth to draw blood.
Fines for environmental atrocities have to be more than just the cost of doing business.
Regulation remains a dirty word in the business world, the one espoused by economists who think Adam Smith's notion of an invisible hand will somehow magically guide the market in the right direction.
The recent economic meltdown and overwhelming evidence of continued environmental devastation tells us otherwise.
Corporations are guilty as charged when it comes to short-term horizons since business is, after all, pursuit of one thing and one thing alone: profit.
Environmental disaster, pollution and a blatant disregard for sustainability are just a part of satisfying the people that really matter in the business equation: the shareholders who'll pull the plug if profits go south.
It is the corporation, with no ethical or moral obligations in a court of law, that has paradoxically created both heaven and hell on earth. We live in an age of unparalleled wealth and privilege, with consumer goods and services of frighteningly lavish proportions. But since the advent of the industrial age, we've been consuming and polluting without conscience, as part of a grand leap toward modernity and all its ill-fated glory.
For sure, though, we have some reservations about our newly built empires. We wonder about smog days, depleting oil resources and dwindling fresh water supplies. We see the cracks starting to show in economies around the world, economies built on the profit-at-all-costs motto, and blindly assume that everything will somehow return to normal. But maybe our version of normal is fatally flawed.
Democratic capitalist economies have delivered some societies out of the Wilderness and into the Promised Land, but at what cost?
What good is the modern lifestyle if the trade off is lack of fresh air, clean water and safe food supplies?
We can't blame corporations or anyone in business for that matter for wanting to make money.
But I think there's good reason to rethink the illusion that an invisible hand can guide economies that are in our best interest, when the corporate path is decisively driven by a profit-at-all-cost mandate with no room for moral implications.