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

hope at the end of our tether S 193
high authority that the truth will set us free from illusion, greed,
and ill will—and, perhaps with a bit of luck, from self-imposed
destruction—but that will require a deeper and more fundamental
transformation. But exactly what does this mean?
We have come to what Alastair McIntosh calls “a great dying
time of evolutionary history” (McIntosh, 2008, p. 191). Some of
the traits, skills, and abilities that enabled humankind to survive
and eventually to thrive over the millennia are now dangerous to
our future. I refer specifi cally to our fondness for violence. The
means of mass destruction are now cheap and easily accessible
to nation-states, terrorist organizations, and the merely demented
alike. Amplifi ed by confl icts over oil, land, and resources, the likelihood
of their use is only a matter of time and circumstance, barring
a transformation that seems now to be almost inconceivable.
Throughout history we’ve tried brute force over and over
again, and that is the lamentable story of empires rising and falling.
In 1648 the creators of the Westphalian system of sovereign
nation-states tried to improve things slightly by creating a few
rules to govern interstate anarchy in Europe. The architects of the
post–World War II world similarly made incremental improvements
by creating international institutions such as the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations.
Nonetheless, war and militarization have a stronger hold on
human affairs than ever and threaten, sooner or later, to devour
the human prospect.
In the last few centuries we applied the same mind-set to nature.
We’ve bullied, bulldozed, and reengineered her down to the gene,
and that got us into more trouble and perplexities than a dozen
scientifi c journals could adequately describe. Some now propose
that we manage nature even more intensely—but the same goal
with smarter methods will only delay the inevitable. Either way,
we are rapidly creating a different Earth, and one we are not going
to like. We can quibble about the timing of disaster, but, given our
present course, there is no serious argument about its inevitability.