Down to the Wire Confronting Cl David W Orr

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Rather like the builders of the great cathedrals of Europe, we will need stamina and faith to work knowing that we will not live to see the results.I begin by assuming the most optimistic outcome possible—that, by a combination of advanced technology and wise policy choices, the world will quickly act to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases and reduce emissions to a level below that which would lead to runaway climate change.Nonetheless, barring some quite unexpected technological breakthrough, the consequences of what we have already “bought” will still cause great hardship everywhere.Glib talk about “climate solutions” misleads by conveying the impression that climate is merely a problem that can be quickly solved by technological fixes without addressing the larger structure of ideas, philosophies, assumptions, and paradigms that have brought us to the brink of irreversible disaster.The point is the same as one that has been attributed to Einstein: “significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them” (Calaprice, 2005, p.292).There are certainly better technologies to be deployed, and far better ones soon to come.But the climate is not likely to be restabilized by any known technical fix quickly, easily, or painlessly.Rather, as geophysicist David Archer puts it:The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge.Longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of civilization so far … [it] will persist for hundreds of thousands of years into the future.(Archer, 2009, pp.1, 90)Climate change, in other words, is not so much a problem to be fixed but rather a steadily worsening condition with which we must contend for a long time to come.Improved technology, at best, will only reduce the scale of the problem and buy us time to build the foundations for a more durable and decent civilization.In the words of biologist Anthony Barnoski, “stabilizing [climate] in this sense means global temperature staying more or less constant for at least hundreds, probably thousands of years.In short, as far as generations of humans are concerned, we probably never will revert back to the ‘old’ climate” (2009, p.29).The few remaining climate skeptics aside, there are two general positions that bear on my own views.The first is the belief that there is a rising tide of groups, associations, and nongovernmental organizations forming around the world as a kind of planetary immune system that will transform our politics, heal the widening breach between humankind and the rest of nature, and lead on to sunnier uplands.There is considerable evidence for what Paul Hawken calls “blessed unrest.” Clearly something is astir in the world, and perhaps it will eventually transform our manner of living and relating to the world and to each other.But it has not done so yet.In the meantime, carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever before while inequality, violence, economic stress, and ecological degradation grow.How blessed unrest amplified by the Internet will fare in an increasingly destabilized world is anyone’s guess, but to get through the bottleneck more or less intact we will need lots more of it, well organized, creatively applied, and allied with leadership in all sectors of society.But there is no adequate substitute for better leadership at all levels, including those who are engaged in the conduct of the public business, which is to say politics.A second view holds that we ought to focus only on solutions, not problems and dilemmas.But the solutions most talked about are technological and so neither require nor result in any particular improvement in our behavior, politics, or economics that brought us to our present situation in the first place.And neither do they call us to rethink the rationality of our underlying motives and objectives or become aware of the political and social choices hidden in our technologies (Winner, 1986, pp.19–39).The aim, merely, is to do what we are already doing more efficiently and effectively without asking whether it is worth doing at all.We ought, it is said, to make hope possible, not despair plausible.I believe that to be a good rule until wishful thinking masquerades as hope and avoidance of despair becomes evasion of reality.Those who focus exclusively on solutions are rather like doctors who only prescribe and never diagnose.In the real world an effective prescription depends a great deal on an accurate diagnosis of the nature and source of the problem.After decades of hyperconsumerism and worship of commerce, a dose of reality, with or without despair, would lay the foundation for a more grounded, sober, and authentic hope.Our best chance of surviving through the long emergency ahead lies in our capacity to face difficult facts squarely, think clearly about our possibilities, and get down to work.The faith placed in better technology is tied to the faith in unfettered markets and commerce, the reputation of which had been much improved due to the efforts of Milton Friedman and his free-market disciples until the economic collapse of 2008.The appeal to economic self-interest as the engine of human progress has its origins in the writings of Adam Smith, and there is much to be said on its behalf.Forgotten in the euphoria, however, are Smith’s own misgivings about the results of unalloyed self-interest, evident in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Pokrewne