"One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever," is what the Good Book says. In truth, a great deal of what we obsess over today won't much be remembered or matter in a few decades, much less a hundred years or two. The damage we are doing to this Earth, however, does have the potential to reach far into the future and greatly alter the lives of those generations to cometh. That's your grandchildren and mine, folks, and their kids after them. Nevertheless, we hear precious little in the news these days about the environment — except for global climate change, about which we're doing precious little.

One story that did seem to make an impression this past summer concerned a section of the Pacific Ocean — a patch now twice the size of Texas — that is a concentrated, toxic stew of plastics. Plastics that, if the mere fact of this doesn't concern you, are entering the food chain on which we, humans, sit atop. There was a week or so of concern and even outrage about this, and people still bring it up from time to time. But it's yet to become a rallying cry for change in how we treat the oceans from which life arose and which sustain us still.

These would be the same oceans that, according to National Geographic, have been producing large blobs of disease-carrying mucus: "marine mucilage" — clusters of dead and living organic matter that attract bacteria and viruses and have been popping up in the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas. They are harmful to humans and fish and have been increasing exponentially in recent years.

These would be the same oceans that, according to report after report, modern fishing techniques have cleaned out to the point where all — all! — the world's fisheries are in danger of collapse by mid-century. The same oceans where larger species such as tuna and swordfish consumed so much mercury that to eat them with regularity is to openly court mercury poisoning.

Surely, you may be thinking, the world's governments must be doing something about all this. Well, they have. In 2003, for example, 123 national signatories to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity pledged to "achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the local, national and regional levels, as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth." This week, leading biodiversity experts meeting in South Africa concluded that the parties to this convention will fall far short of the goals to which they committed.

What is the price of inaction? According to these same experts, rates of extinction that statistics show are dramatically worse than even the most dire predictions of a few years ago.

We are gradually destroying the only home we know, which is another way of saying that we're gradually destroying ourselves. The signs have become unmistakable, but our governments and our other institutions, built to respond to short-term needs to the practical exclusion of all others, are doing little to nothing. The needs of the present are always pressing, but it may be time to start thinking and acting long term, before it's too late to act at all.