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

S
34 politics and governance
to any one generation, which assumed the deterioration to be
natural—the problem of “shifting baselines.” Many of the causes
of ecological deterioration were simply unknown or operated at
a scale—either too large or too small—or at a velocity—either
too fast or too slow—that we could not comprehend. And much
enamored of science and technology and blinded by the 18thcentury
ideology of progress and economic growth, we did not
see what was happening right before our eyes. In the 20th century,
the warnings came more often and helped to launch the environmental
movement of the 1960s. But the totality of the problem
remained shrouded in political controversy and concealed by
complexity and was mostly ignored by much of the public, which
was happily diverted by consumption and mass entertainment. In
the opening decades of the 21st century, the evidence of global
environmental collapse is unmistakable—the result of decades of
failed policies and inadequate remedies (Speth, 2008).
But how do we say such things to the public effectively enough
to galvanize a constituency for signifi cant changes in government,
business, and daily life? On one side of the debate are many with a
deep concern about the state of the environment who believe that
the public, told the full truth, would either ignore it or become
despondent. On the other side are those who believe that the
only chance to mobilize the public in the brief time available is to
speak the truth without exaggeration, but without diluting it with
“happy talk.” There is, in other words, a serious difference between
those who, like T. S. Eliot, believe that “human kind/ Cannot bear
very much reality” and those who advocate an approach like that
of Winston Churchill in 1940, who summoned the British people
to a considerable level of heroism, while offering only “blood, toil,
tears, and sweat.” With bombs falling on London, Churchill did
not talk cheerily about the new opportunities for urban renewal
or the possibilities for defeating the Nazis at a profi t. But one
of the unknowns of our time is whether we are still the kind of
people who can be summoned to heroism when it’s all on the