A Slow and Endless Horror - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 106

humanity as a whole ceased to be guaranteed; it was no longer as defini-
tive a reality as nature itself. 113 No longer could we be confident that a
divine force was protecting us or that our cultural values might in some
way prevent our annihilation. Indeed, for a time it seemed possible that
the contest over those values might lead to our annihilation. The things
we held sacred and the things that threatened our reality were potentially
one and the same.
But in contrast to climate change, nuclear annihilation, however hor-
rifying, seems almost comforting. We imagined that event as an interrup-
tion of our everyday lives. What made it truly terrible was the prospect
that it would suddenly destroy billions of lives that would otherwise con-
tinue and possibly flourish. As a result, for virtually everyone the threat
of nuclear war inspired an immense desire that ordinary life itself would
endure. The absolutely horrifying thought of the world's end autho-
rized an absolute affirmation of the familiar. That emotion was typical
not only of anti-nuclear activists but of heads of state as well: the doc-
trine of mutually assured destruction, propagated by the U.S. Secretary
of Defense Robert McNamara, drew on this emotion, claiming that the
Soviets would not destroy us if they knew we would destroy them in turn,
and vice versa. The idea was that our affection for the lives we led and
our hope for the future would make it impossible to push the buton. he
prospect of total destruction could paradoxically lead ordinary citizens as
well as heads of state back to their primary loyalty to the familiar world,
perhaps even intensifying that loyalty in a manner not known to any prior
generation. If anything, the nuclear era inspired us to regard ordinary life
as fragile and so to value it all the more. The threat could somehow give
the everyday a stunning intensity.
Climate change, however, is another mater. As I suggested in the
introduction, this time around, the prospect of future ruins arises from
our way of life, rather than threatening to interrupt it. Virtually every-
thing we do in advanced industrial societies is powered by the burning
of fossil fuels in a process that directly contributes to global warming.
The implications of this threat are thus truly unprecedented. If we wish
to ward off a globally traumatic event, our task is not simply to avoid a
certain course of action, to refrain from hiting the buton. We face the
much more difficult challenge of undoing and transforming a fundamental