The Ruins to Come - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 85

of their civilizations, but they could still assume that they might survive
elsewhere and that they or their progeny could build anew. 97 The passing
of a civilization, however enormous an event, is never definitive; every-
body knows that something else will happen, another round of history
will begin. And all these changes are paltry in comparison to the endur-
ance of the natural environment that human beings take for granted.
Rome falls, the Holocene endures, and thus Rome can be built again.
Not anymore. If anything, Rome still flourishes, only more success-
fully than ever. No previous generations have experienced anything
approaching the abundance of modern life. Modern, industrial civiliza-
tion is being replicated around the world, “developing” nations seek to
join the club of wealthy countries, and the reckless consumption of the
Earth goes on unchecked. Yet that fossil-fuel abundance is threatening
the Holocene, the complex, relatively stable state of the Earth we have
enjoyed over the last 10,000 years. Now, Rome flourishes so extrava-
gantly that the Holocene will fall—and as a result, so too will Rome. We
cannot be confident that other societies will flourish in place of our own;
what will befall us will happen in some other way to all the world's cul-
tures. Nor can we assume we will build anew. We may not yet know how
to build anything that will endure on this transformed Earth; finding a
way to do so will be a perpetual challenge. At least in one respect, the
eclipse of our future will be definitive: : it admits of no escape, for it will
apply to the human species as a whole.
A defeat on this scale may still place us in a dilemma that others have
faced. Other societies, after all, have been faced with even bleaker pros-
pects, barred from sustaining their former traditions on their own terms.
Consider the aboriginal Tasmanians. After they were colonized on their
native island, decimated by disease and violence, and imprisoned by their
European masters on a small portion of their former land, they found
themselves so spiritually destroyed that they merely waited for death
and within a few years disappeared entirely. 98 A less devastating version
of this defeat happened in the recent past, not long after the fall of the
Berlin wall. When capitalism swept over the Soviet Union, shatering the
remnants of communism's promises, the life expectancy among men dra-
matically declined, as if the loss of that society's foundations gave them
litle reason to go on. 99 Neither society was especially heartened that