A Slow and Endless Horror - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 103

We who live in the developed world are clearly perpetrators of a great
violence. Yet it is not as if we will escape the consequences of our actions.
We are immersed in a society that continues to emit greenhouse gases at
a ridiculous pace, and most of us will also live long enough to endure the
consequences of those emissions. We, too, will endure great difficulties;
our societies will be wrenched as well. As a result, we will become our
own victims. Some of today's wealthy may assume that their money will
enable them to survive relatively unscathed through a dystopian future.
But no individual should be complacent; economic disarray and interne-
cine violence have a way of shatering any smug arrangements, destroy-
ing businesses and households, and leaving individuals stranded in the
midst of chaos. The return of injustice and violence potentially extends
to all of us; we cannot be sure we are not enslaving ourselves, creating a
prison that neither we nor others can escape.
If we take these scenarios just one step further, we can place the
potential consequences of climate change within the history of collec-
tive destruction. In a previous chapter I mentioned that climate change
most likely created the conditions for the brutal violence in Darfur. 111
In itself, of course, climate change does not actually take human lives; it
creates the miserable matrix for that violence. By destroying ecosystems,
depriving people of their livelihoods, and forcing them to migrate, cli-
mate change vastly increases the opportunity for conflict. The events of
Darfur illustrate that fact well. Once climate change increases in its sever-
ity, further violence of this kind is nearly inevitable—and not only in
areas far removed from the developed nations. Because the modern state
often takes unintelligent, corrupt, and oppressive forms, because several
versions of violent stateless entities (insurgent armies, separatist organi-
zations, or jihadist movements) have emerged and are likely to arise in
many regions of the world, because absolutist ideologies of various kinds
still have armed adherents, and because ethnic rivalry and prejudice
thrive as well, all the ingredients for international conflict, civil war, and
systemic murder remain in place. Now that we're adding climate change
to the mix, those ingredients are more combustible than ever before.
The prospect of this future violence takes shape against the back-
ground of our greater awareness of its costs. In recent decades, many
interpreters have become increasingly conscious of the psychological