Infinite Responsibility - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 115

that still promises eventual recovery, we are caught within an emotional
dynamic whose foundations are disappearing.
We thus find ourselves in a situation where we cannot help but seek
some other basis for ethical action, another resource for endurance.
Once we recognize that the future is in ruins and our present is shatered,
the task of encountering the human significance of climate change is not
yet complete, for we must still discover some foundation on which we can
build, a foundation that can stand no mater what may come. Finding
that foundation is the task of this chapter.
The first step in doing so is simply for us to accept the present hor-
ror in full. Doing so is surprisingly rare. One would think that our highly
contradictory, almost impossible position would inspire consternation or
outrage. Instead, we have in general responded in a very different tone.
Nearly everyone endures this crisis in distraction, mild dismay, ambiva-
lent passivity, indifference—or in a sort of baffled indignation. This very
absence of a passionate response from the great majority of us is striking.
What could possibly explain our reluctance to acknowledge the night-
mare qualities of our ethical dilemma—or what is worse, our tendency to
accept it in a mode of quiet desperation?
The answer may well lie within the history I outlined in the previ-
ous chapter. We've been living with disaster so long that we're used to
it. For generations now we have accepted the shatering of tradition, the
decimation of native peoples, enslavement, economic displacement and
exploitation, genocide, and the threat of nuclear annihilation as inevita-
ble aspects of our world. Such violence is so interwoven into the very fab-
ric of modern culture that we cannot imagine a world after it has ceased.
In consequence, we do not truly atempt to move beyond what we know.
We seem to have surrendered ourselves to the prospect not only of our
mortality, but of the potential destruction of our societies, our ecosy-
tems, and the biosphere itself. Although we protest against these pros-
pects, in the end we consider any concerted atempt to overcome them
as delusional.
We might at times suggest that we disapprove of this violence, but
at every turn we take it for granted, accept its results, and flourish on
the wealth it produces. We often treat those who protest as moralizing
annoyances, as partisans of a simplistic and ultimately failed viewpoint.