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

156 S farther horizons
ameliorate the deep fi ssures that divide people. Some climate
change is irrevocable, water stress will persist in many places,
extinct species will not return, and lives will be lost to deprivation.
(Raskin et al., 2002, pp. 94–95)
Considerably less optimistic, Thomas Berry concludes that “It
is already determined that our children and grandchildren will
live amid the ruined infrastructures of the industrial world and
amid the ruins of the natural world itself” (2006, p. 95). James
Lovelock’s view is even darker: “the acceleration of the climate
change now under way will sweep away the comfortable environment
to which we are adapted . . . . [There is evidence of ] an
imminent shift in our climate towards one that could easily be
described as Hell” (2006, pp. 7, 147; The Vanishing Face of Gaia,
2009). Given such dire predictions, theologian Jack Miles, author
of A History of God (2000), suggests that we begin to ponder the
possibility that “the effort to produce a sustainable society has
defi nitively failed . . . that we are irreversibly en route to extinction.”
Alan Weisman, in a striking exercise of journalistic imagination,
describes in The World Without Us how our infrastructure
would then crumble, collapse, and fi nally disappear (2007). These
are only a few of the recent musings about the human prospect.
But we’ve been alerted, warned, and warned again by ecologists,
geologists, systems analysts, physicists, sociologists, political scientists,
biologists, National Book Award winners, Pulitzer Prize
winners, Nobel laureates, teams of international scientists, and the
wisest among us, but so far without much effect.
Might we still avert catastrophe? Facing the realities of ecological
decline, the end of the era of cheap fossil fuels, and the
destabilization of climate, it is not easy to fi nd solid ground for
hope in a sea of wishful thinking, evasion, and half measures.
I believe that there are grounds for genuine hope, but since we
have frittered away our margin of safety, they are a century or
more ahead in an unknown future when we have stabilized the