Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 8
A Slow and Endless Horror
So far I have been suggesting that our situation of facing the conse-
quences of climate change for our future is unprecedented. We've never
before contemplated the possibility that the life we know might be altered
beyond recognition in quite this way. But it's worth pausing to consider
whether this relation to the future is really all that new. Are we in fact
experiencing as strange a moment as all that? Aren't people in modern
cultures used to facing these kinds of uncertainties as a mater of course
by now? What is really new in our current situation?
We are, after all, the heirs of a long history of devastation. Over the
past several centuries our societies have engendered and endured sys-
temic, irreversible transformation in its various forms, including those
in which expansion and liberation evolved into devastation and geno-
cide. For half a millennium we have had to accept the possibility that the
invasive power of modern economic and political regimes could destroy
entire traditions, cultures, and peoples. This history is so long, difficult,
and bloody—and so convenient to ignore—that it may be useful to
review it for a moment.
The European encounter with the New World led to an era of coloni-
zation on nearly every continent, a patern that in turn frequently deci-
mated native populations and drew upon the murderous enslavement of
Africans to provide labor for the new world. The scientific and industrial
revolutions, in their turn, made possible the creation of modern industrial
capitalism, which superseded traditional trades and handicrafts, forced
a long demographic shift from the countryside to the city, and subordi-
nated national economies to global trade and financial networks, forever
altering the preindustrial way of life. At times, that process had brutal
effects. The British application of a particular theory of the free market in
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