Infinite Responsibility - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 120

energy-efficient techniques, minimize the environmental harm from our
management of forests and farmland, create market-driven incentives for
everyone to take these steps, fund a wide array of new technology proj-
ects and implement them as soon as possible, and reach international
agreements that would enable nations around the world to undertake
similar efforts of their own. 116 As I have suggested, to do so would require
that we act in a truly revolutionary manner—that we would defy the
assumptions and habits of generations for the sake of a common end.
By acting in that decisive way, however, we would also do much more.
We would demonstrate that we are free in a sense scarcely ever men-
tioned by the pretended partisans of liberty—that we are not merely
puppets of our cultural traditions but are still capable of making the right
choice despite all odds. For much of this topic, I have outlined a series of
tough obstacles in our path, including the short timeline for action, the
difficult technical challenges, the limits of our political institutions, our
addiction to economic growth, the self-interested calculus of state inter-
est, and the belief in a false version of freedom. But it does not follow that
these factors ultimately determine what we will do; we are still capable of
surpassing what we have so far achieved.
But acting in this way would ultimately go much further than showing
our power to alter our common history. If we truly enacted the necessary
ecological revolution, we would finally bring about what our forebears
barely envisioned and scarcely ever atempted. In doing so we would also
address the systemic violence and excess of modern culture, that vast leg-
acy of exploitation and devastation that still defines our time. Choosing
justice would not only enable us to transform our historical circumstance;
it would also take responsibility for that history. It would say that in our
freedom, we are capable of making that history our own, placing it to our
charge , and judging it in the clear light of its consequences. Most crucially
of all, it would show that we can make reparation, do justice to those we
have harmed and would otherwise still harm, and fight against the moti-
vating force of this history. By taking up this task, we need not admit to
an inherited guilt; we are not automatically accountable for the actions
of our forebears, any more than those who follow us will be accountable
for ours. Our act would thus be free in yet another sense, for it would be
freely chosen rather than demanded; it would suggest that we are capable