Infinite Responsibility - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 123

un natural in a precise sense. Facing that legacy, our challenge is to step
outside biological determinations in a further and opposite sense, to
accept responsibility for addressing the ecological violence endemic throughout
our history as a species , to make reparation as greatly as we can to the web
of life from which we evolved and in which we live.
Taking responsibility for that history may not be the first course of
action that many observers would consider. Contemplating this long
history of ecological destruction, some might simply wish that human
beings would cease to exist: only that prospect, they might argue, could
protect the further flourishing of life. But this profoundly misanthropic
wish, which could never come true in any case, denies that we, too, are
part of the life whose future we wish to protect; eradicating ourselves, if
only in thought, is to partake in a version of ecological destruction and
genocide multiplied many times over. It is to imagine the kind of devasta-
tion that our ethical action is aiming to prevent.
The point is not to destroy humanity, but to undo what Stephen Jay
Gould called our “cosmic arrogance,” the anthropocentric atitude that
imagined we were the pinnacle of evolution, its ultimate goal. 120 he best
strategy in defeating that arrogance is not to negate human history but
paradoxically to affirm it and transform it as a result— to make our pres-
ence on the Earth into a presence for the Earth, as an agent charged
with protecting all its forms of life. Choosing to do justice to the life of
which we are a part, we would freely accept a task that no other species
has atempted to perform: to deny our impulse to thrive and reproduce
without limit. By taking this unnatural step, we would finally become the
stewards of that realm to which we owe our existence and which, thanks
to us, can no longer flourish of itself. Paradoxically, by fully assuming our
unnatural status as stewards, we would at last do justice to the biosphere,
making the thriving of all life an ethical , not merely biological, good. If we
set out to do so, we might set as our goal the challenge of becoming genu-
inely indigenous again, of truly inhabiting the ecosystems where we live
with intelligence, modesty, and foresight, and thus prove ourselves capa-
ble at last of joining that long counter-tradition, also evident throughout
our history as a species, of human generosity to the ecosystems of which
we are a part.