Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 10
Making Reparation: Offset Your Life
If, as I have just suggested, owning disaster is also to own the demand for
reparation, even where reparation is impossible, then our way of surviv-
ing the slow horror of our time does not relieve us of the task of practic-
ing justice in everyday life. On the contrary, given the enormity of the
disaster we now take to our own account, the task becomes enormous as
well. All our pragmatic actions in consequence thus become small indica-
tions of a reparation we will never and can never complete, a task as incal-
culable as the disaster it is meant to repair.
But if we commit ourselves to doing justice in our daily lives, we
immediately face a series of skeptical responses from ourselves or others.
What can we do as individuals in the face of such an enormous crisis?
Individual action can do very litle in comparison to concerted national
and international measures to address the key causes of climate change.
But this is not in fact an objection to a renewed ethics; it is rather a
description of our first, overriding, and most pressing task: fighting hard
for an ecological revolution. All other actions we might take pale in com-
parison. When our political institutions pose obstacles to the necessary
transformation, we should become more creative, change tactics, and try
new angles on the problem. If we fail again, we should persist with still
further efforts. Nothing should ever intimidate us.
But it does not follow that we need do nothing to change our behavior
in our own lives. If we are to do justice no mater what comes, we must
commit ourselves to making a difference however we can. Doing so may
be difficult if it's clear that we are still caught within a society that refuses
to alter its ways. Yet we cannot use that fact as an excuse. As I asked
above, how tolerant are we toward a slaveholder who refused to liberate
his “property” on the excuse that his doing so would not by itself liberate
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