A Slow and Endless Horror - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 105

for it provides no more than the matrix for conflict. But since it does that
much—and can therefore generate a perpetual series of horrific events—
it is actually much larger than any single genocide. It is at once less and
more than the violence in Darfur.
In fact, since we cannot know precisely what form of climate change
our present use of energy will create in the future, the specific implications
of our acts remain out of reach. The problem here is not an experience
that is too vivid, so shatering we simply cannot absorb it, but one that
is too removed, too difficult to capture. Climate change works on tape
delay: someone acts in a harmful manner, and the results might emerge
soon, perhaps decades later. It also works in the aggregate; any single act
can contribute to an overall disorientation of the climate, which in turn
causes a series of further physical processes to kick in. Climate change
is caused by a systemic violence that is cut off from any direct tie to its
consequences.
As a result, our actions as participants in a fossil-fuel economy are
accompanied, not by trauma, but by its photographic negative, as it were,
its equally devastating counterpart—a violence we can infer but not
actually see. Our actions thus take on an unknowable extra dimension,
an imprecise but palpable edge, for they are inevitably shadowed by the
horror to come. For trauma in its original sense, events are too vivid and
specific for the mind to handle; in contrast, for the anticipatory trauma of
our time, the mind conceives of a real violence that is not yet vivid or spe-
cific enough. If trauma is the result of an experience that is too intense,
too heavy, we live an experience that is too light. But in this way, we too
participate in events we cannot absorb, a horror we cannot assimilate.
These reflections may clarify the place of climate change within the
history of enslavement, war, and genocide. But what about its effect on
a world now used to the prospect of global nuclear war? That threat,
far more encompassing even than genocide, threatened to destroy the
entire human reality in a moment, almost without warning, wiping out
everything we cherish in a single blow. Without a doubt, it endangered
our individual and collective lives on a fundamental level. The fact that
a head of state in the United States or the Soviet Union, and to a lesser
degree in other nations, could in a single gesture threaten the viability of
the human race was unprecedented. In the nuclear era, the existence of