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

the carbon connection S 125
atmosphere, where it traps the heat that amplifi es storms in the
Gulf of Mexico. They are connected by the lineaments of tragedy
in which the poor are required to participate in their own undoing
by ravaging their places in order to live. They are connected by
the bonds of hubris through which some presume to tempt fate
by violating the limits of the biosphere and thereby call forth suffering
and misery. New Orleans and West Virginia are connected
by the bonds of unnecessary suffering infl icted, it is said, by the
necessity to have our energy cheaply and by the brutal imperatives
of a kind of calculation that is used to justify endless wars while
refusing to repair a wounded city and make its peoples whole.
We are now engaged in a global debate about what it means
to become “sustainable.” But no one knows how we might secure
our increasingly tenuous presence on the Earth or what that will
require of us. We have good reason to suspect, however, that the
word “sustainable” must imply something deeper than merely the
application of more technology and smarter economics. It is possible,
and perhaps even likely, that more of the same “solutions”
would only compound our tribulations. The effort to secure a
decent human future, I think, must be built on the awareness of
the connections that bind us to each other to all life and to all life
to come. And, in time, that awareness will transform our politics,
laws, economics, philosophies, manner of living, worldviews, and
politics. 2