A Slow and Endless Horror - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 108

give us either ending to the story. It doesn't destroy us outright, nor does
it let us live on as we are. It combines devastation and survival. It doesn't
give us apocalypse, nor does it give us the satisfaction of having avoided
the world's end. It is something altogether different, as if it is at once sin-
ister and benign. It's as if climate change tells us that the world ends, yet it
goes on—or that it ends, gradually, as it goes on. It gives us that unprec-
edented experience: a slow and endless horror.
This dimension of climate change compounds its already paradoxi-
cal effect on everyday life. Because the consequences of climate change
are neither immediate nor absolute, we can surmise, if we wish, that it
imposes far less of a moral imperative on us than the nuclear threat did.
Our society so far hardly wishes to embark on the necessary effort to
comply with that imperative, for it is still thwarted by those who protest
against taking action, and the rest of us have not yet demanded a revo-
lutionary transformation strongly enough. We delay and hesitate while
crucial decades go by. Such recalcitrance would have been impossible in
the nuclear era: nobody seriously atempted to deny that the bombing
of Hiroshima had taken place or that the Soviet Union existed. Today,
however, in the United States, negating reality has become the profession
of many and the hobby of millions, and a general indifference or passivity
characterizes many more.
In consequence, for Americans reality is split once again: the physi-
cal fact of climate change has not yet achieved the status of a social or
political fact. At the moment, we Americans live in a society that fails to
acknowledge the crisis of the biosphere. The climate tells us one thing,
our politics another. In consequence, we endure a state of radical disso-
ciation. For us in the United States, things are truly confusing: not only
is the world ending as it goes on, we also hear that it is not ending at all.
Because we cannot defeat that false message, we sense that our everyday
lives devastate our own future—and present—while also being asked
to pretend they are doing nothing of the sort. The contrast between our
knowledge of the consequences of our actions and a collective, deaden-
ing indifference continues to grow, making the incoherence of our expe-
rience even worse.
Here again, in retrospect the nuclear doesn't look so bad. The nuclear
threat almost seemed to take care of itself: the doctrine of mutually