Time's Up - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 48

To give up the dream of progress and accept the prospect of a perpetu-
ally worsening world would be an immense loss for all of us. Without the
promise of beter lives for everyone, few of the atitudes of modern life
survive intact. Facing the reality of our present moment, then, requires
much more than an assessment of how we are doing in reducing our
greenhouse gas emissions. It requires nothing less than a wholesale reex-
amination of the progressive atitude we inherit from the Enlightenment,
a rethinking of the most basic atitudes we take for granted about our
relation to the future.
Looking at our present moment in this way does not force us to give
up our fight to ward it off in the first place. Nevertheless, as people begin
to admit more and more that we have come to the final years in our effort
to avoid irreversible climate change, as the emphasis falls ever more on
adaptation, the question of how to be honest about our situation with-
out giving up on the batle becomes more pressing. Al Gore once com-
mented that “an astonishing number of people go straight from denial
to despair, without pausing on the intermediate step of saying, ' We can
do something about this!'” 84 He's absolutely right. I would only add that
despair can be a form of denial: it, too, allows us to dismiss the problem,
to assume we're not responsible. Since nobody can do a thing, we're
off the hook.
But what if we have been dedicated to doing something about it—and
nothing happens? What if we do what we can, join an activist community
such as Repower America, the group Gore founded to agitate for political
action, encourage the nation to shift to renewable sources by the end of
the decade, and help individuals to take voluntary actions to reduce their
carbon footprint—but ultimately realize the necessarily big shift will not
take place in time? What then?
That question is what this topic is about. Here we are now, fully aware
of climate change and what it can bring, well aware of what we can do,
but thwarted from real action. We're stuck in a holding patern, as if we
must simply accept our fate. It would be the height of foolishness at this
key moment simply to give up and abandon the effort. It's devastatingly
clear that our first task is to intensify the effort. After all, we are talking
about the world's greatest crime, ecocide, an assault on our entire plan-
et's ecology. It far outweighs genocide, the destruction of a people, for it