The God of the Whirlwind - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 169

into the Anthropocene, the era in which human activities determine the
context of existence for all living things.
But if nature ends in one sense, it endures in another. Although we
may erase a nature free of human influence, nature nevertheless persists
in altered form. Our activities may ultimately force massive changes to
the planet's dynamic systems, but those systems, accepting the new con-
ditions of the biosphere, will go on doing their work. In its new mode,
nature may no longer be “wild” in the sense that it is free of human inter-
ference. But because it is far outside our control, threatens the built envi-
ronment in which we live, and indeed promises to shater the cultural
continuity we take for granted, it may be even more “wild” in the rather
different sense that it is now excessively powerful and seemingly hostile
to human concerns. We may ultimately have given nature a new guise as
something even less hospitable to us than before, something far more
capable of reminding us of our weakness and vulnerability.
Most of the time our discussions of climate change ask how we might
endure in this new world by focusing on practical, technological, and eth-
ical questions. But as I suggested a moment ago, we do not live only on
those levels. We cannot grasp our situation through a bare rendition of
the facts; we need stories, figures, parables—in short, myths—to make
our reality come fully alive to us, to make it possible for us to do justice
to our moment. The point, of course, would not be to replicate the sto-
ries by which we once lived; the myths we need today might well contest,
undercut, or even destroy those familiar tales, revealing why they are no
longer credible, no longer in some sense true. What stories might we tell
to interpret our place in this wild domain?
One story could be the history of a mind-boggling error whereby we
ruined the Earth's living systems for all creatures. This would be a fairly
implausible new story of a fall, in which we once again commit a great
crime and are cast out of Eden—this time, the garden of the planet's liv-
ing systems over the last ten millennia.
Or we might prefer to tell the story as a tragedy. In one version, we
could narrate how the technologies that enabled us to liberate ourselves
from an ancient scarcity also proved to be our undoing. In a more sweep-
ing rendition, we would see our actions as another episode in a much
longer history of human ineptitude, achieving a tragic knowledge of