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.3 In the long emergency ahead, people, communities, societies, institutions, organizations, and global society will be sorely stressed.The third quality of leadership in these circumstances is the capacity to foster a vision of a humane and decent future.Such a future will require a great deal of kindness for growing numbers of people who will need our help as friends, neighbors, community members, and fellow sojourners on this fragile craft that we call civilization.Eventually, we will need their help as well.No one will remain unaffected by climate destabilization and its many consequences that will spill across the boundaries of geography, circumstance, and time.The news about climate, oceans, species, and all of the collateral human consequences will get a great deal worse for a long time before it gets better.The reasons for authentic hope are on a farther horizon, centuries ahead when we have managed to stabilize the carbon cycle and reduce carbon levels close to their preindustrial levels, stopped the hemorrhaging of life on Earth, restored the chemical balance of the oceans, and created governments and economies calibrated to the realities of the biosphere and to the diminished ecologies of the postcarbon world.The change in our perspective from the nearer to the longer term is, I think, the most difficult challenge we will face.We have become a culture predicated on fast results, quick payoffs, and instant gratification.But now we will have to summon the fortitude necessary to undertake a longer and more arduous journey.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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]