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

millennial hope S 157
carbon cycle, reduced the concentration of greenhouse gases to
preindustrial levels, stopped the hemorrhaging of life, and fi nally
ended the curse of violence, and when the biosphere has begun
to self-repair. On the other side of E. O. Wilson’s “bottleneck”
we do not know what size the human population will be, what
history our descendants will have traversed, how much biological
diversity will have survived, or whether stressed ecosystems will
recover in time spans meaningful to humans (Wilson, 2002). James
Lovelock, for one, believes that the human population will be no
larger than one billion, and likely much less (2006, p. 141). Onethird
to perhaps one-half of the species presently on Earth could
go extinct in this century. Heat stress, changes in the amount and
intensity of rainfall, and ecological degradation will drastically
change most ecosystems.
The Earth, then, will be very different from the planet we’ve
known. Our descendants who come through the bottleneck may
reside in the same places in which we do, but they will most
likely live in very different circumstances than we presently do.
They will be the survivors of a close call with extinction. Will
they know, and, if so, how will they understand that history?
What will they make of the ruins of industrial civilization, some
submerged far beyond different shorelines? What kind of people
will they be? Will they understand the events, trends, processes,
and people who took us to the brink of extinction? What will
they know about the pre-bottleneck world? Will they know
what they were denied? Will they have succeeded in preserving
the best of human culture, literature, and art? Will they live in a
democracy, a totalitarian state, or tribal anarchy? 1
The reality is simply that the planetary destabilization we’ve
caused and all of the collateral damage to civilization will grow
worse before the Earth’s systems stabilize—hopefully with a biosphere
still capable of supporting civilization. In the meantime,
there will be contrary trends: wind power will continue to grow
rapidly, new technologies will become available, businesses and