Infinite Responsibility - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 119

to in turn—that is, our power to be responsible for others, to others, to
all others, and indeed to the very domain in which all others can flourish.
The interpretation of the world as a scene of countless relationships,
familiar in archaic cultures but gradually marginalized in recent centuries,
provides the ground for a much more coherent approach to the chal-
lenges of our time. Our ambivalent acceptance of the legacy of violence,
for example, stems in part from our inability to conceive of strangers as
related to ourselves. Marooned in the past or future, in another country,
in a reality we consider too far removed from our own, they do not have
enough substance in our minds to merit serious atention. hey exist
within that vast abstraction, our world, which in its incalculable complex-
ity cannot move us. When a great evil such as the Holocaust takes place,
we may experience astonishment, horror, and pain, responding with
enough interest, perhaps, to learn something of its history. But without
recognizing its implication for our ordinary lives, its power to arise from
within institutions familiar to us, we enact only an empty grief, a formal
atentiveness without consequence. We could instead allow our relation-
ship to strangers to have a practical effect on our lives or on the practices
of which we are a part; if we did so, we would actually complete the pro-
cess of grief by identifying the cause of the horror and dealing with it
directly. The point, in short, would be to consider ourselves responsible
for the event and its possible reappearance and to act accordingly.
The same applies to our situation in the era of climate change: we
must not simply mourn the victims of the future, nor merely compre-
hend the problem and its potential solutions, but above all consider our-
selves responsible for whatever damage will take place—responsible, in
short, to coming generations—and thus by definition to respond . Only if
we regard ourselves as participants in a web of mutual obligation will we
have the motivation necessary to overcome indiference and shater our
unthinking, psychotic belief in our right to destroy. Others have given to
us and made our lives possible; let us give to others in return.
To live our moment fully, to feel the horror without reserve, is to be
given fierce motive for ethical action. If we were truly to accept our place
within a web of relationships and thus atempt to respond, what would
follow? Let's imagine that we were to face what Al Gore calls our choice ,
decide wisely, and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions, use more