Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

S
x preface
moment. As a species, however, we are in our adolescence, and as
is common at that stage of life we live dangerously. Specifi cally,
we have created three ways to commit suicide: by nuclear annihilation,
by ecological degradation, and, as computer scientist Bill
Joy notes, by the consequences of our own cleverness—eviction
by technologies that can self-replicate and might one day fi nd
Homo sapiens useless and inconvenient. 1 We have entered an era
that Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson calls “the bottleneck”
(Wilson, 2002, pp. 22–41).
This book is written in the belief that we will come through
that gauntlet chastened but improved. But it will be trial by fi re,
hopefully, a tempering process in which we will shed our illusions
of being separate from nature and our pretense that we can
master nature or each other through violence. On the other side
of the bottleneck, maybe we will have gained a clearer vision of
the value of life and a deeper understanding of what it means to
be stewards and trustees for all life to come. But this is certainly
not the only scenario one might imagine—perhaps, it is not even
very likely. There are darker possibilities with which we must
contend and which we must have the foresight to anticipate and
the wisdom to avoid.
In the fossil fuel age we lived in the unspoken faith that there
are no “booby traps for unwary species,” as biologist Robert Sinsheimer
once put it. Unwittingly we set our own, and now the
carbon trap is nearly sprung. Even before the coal and oil age we
exploited carbon-rich soils and forests, and that is the history of
rising and falling empires and the uneven march of civilization.
The trap was founded on ignorance of our impact on the biogeochemical
cycles of Earth, which posed no serious problems
when we were fewer and depended on sunlight and wind for
our energy. But now the six and a half billion of us, soon perhaps
to be eight or nine billion, are living carbon-intensive lives. We
set the trap and it will now take our most creative and sustained
efforts to avert catastrophe, and that will require reducing our