Infinite Responsibility - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 132

a gesture might be biterly pleasurable and even be partly accurate, but it
would enable us to evade the fact that we benefited from and participated
in the practices that brought about such devastation.
We would thus do far beter to take this failure as our own, to wear
the mantle of defeat, to take responsibility for the collective decision not
to do the right thing—in short, to accept untold loss as a consequence
of our own collective history. Such a step might seem almost impossible
to contemplate, so directly does it name our futility and humiliation. Yet
by taking that step, we would achieve a certain integrity in our power to
assume the full measure of our defeat, to name as our own what would
then be visible as the true contours of human being: its ultimate inhu-
manity. In that bleakest moment, we would accept responsibility even for
the fact that our atempts at responsibility fail, taking to our charge what
would then be revealed as the nullity of our entire history. 125
Here is the ultimate, most unbearable level of responsibility: the task
of owning disaster, puting it to our charge, taking its burden on ourselves
as human beings. At first such a step might seem to take us to the fur-
thest, most biter reach of self-contempt and humiliation; here at last, it
might appear, we truly give up, collapse, dissolve into ruin ourselves. But
such is not the case. Here, at last, we would move beyond our horror at
our inhumanity as well as our grief for the passing of the societies and
ecosystems we knew. By taking responsibility for a vast failure, we would
in that same gesture accept absolute loss without nostalgia and without
condemnation. Giving up the temptation to dismiss humanity as a mere
evolutionary anomaly or to cling to some faint idealization of our kind,
we would accept humanity in all its inhumanity and thus find ourselves
in a space of radical openness, capable of affirming the entire process
that brought us into being. Marooned on the junk heap of history, facing
no prospect of redemption, we might atain a great serenity, broken and
destroyed though we may be.
So it seems that the baffled, broken life I described in the past four
chapters can ultimately lead to something more, to a basis for a renewed
integrity even in the midst of the ruins. That basis is not a new hope, but
the capacity to affirm and endure the worst. To find our way beyond
the trauma of our time, to push beyond a scenario of endless grief, we
can abandon anything that might heal us and instead embrace trauma