Infinite Responsibility - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 127

already be enduring the partial collapse of the civilization we know,
surviving social conflicts, natural disasters, and food shortages that are
unprecedented for us, we may not even have the luxury of worrying
about our future fate. We may discover that we are living in the ruins of
ethical action itself. Our position might be akin to that of a person who
has endured an amputation but must nevertheless save someone from
drowning, or a person who has had a lung removed but still must help
carry the wounded. In such a situation, acting to help others might be
possible, but it is far more difficult and may not occur much at all. 122
It is thus all the more astonishing that we will not act today, when
doing so might actually prevent that nightmare scenario from coming to
pass. The possibility that we might act freely to save the Earth, however,
helps clarify that a failure to act is also a choice: a choice to destroy. The
ecological revolution is missing today, and will be missing tomorrow, not
because it is impossible for us to carry it out but because we will not; it
speaks of our decision to remain relatively indifferent to the destructive
aspects of modern culture, to sustain that destruction well into the future,
and thus to remain caught by the habits of our common history. This
decision, too, we should regard as freely given, as an instance of moral
assertion—this time, however, for inertia, ineptitude, and ultimately for
disaster. It would freely allow our traditions and the bounds of circum-
stance to define us without limit, to saturate us through and through, and
to make us exemplars of what could well be judged as idiocy, mendac-
ity, and moral cowardice. If we made this choice in full awareness of its
consequences, we would do so with a certain negative dignity, perhaps,
as if we were intent on displaying willful blindness and self-destruction,
in embracing intoxication, excess, conflict, and death. But it is far more
likely that we will make this decision without noticing it, without truly
asserting ourselves at all, lapsing into self-destruction as if it came over us
in our sleep.
So far, at least, we may go if we adhere to that slight possibility that
acting now will enable us to salvage a bit of the stolen future. But if we
are honest about the lateness of the hour, we must acknowledge that we
may well have already decided for calamity without consciously choos-
ing a thing. That numbed decision for disaster grows stronger every day;