Introduction

In our final hour (2003), cambridge university astronomer Martin Rees concluded that the odds of global civilization surviving to the year 2100 are no better than one in two. His assessment of threats to humankind ranging from climate change to a collision of Earth with an asteroid received good reviews in the science press, but not a peep from any political leader and scant notice from the media. Compare that nonresponse to a hypothetical story reporting, say, that the president had had an affair. The blow-dried electronic pundits, along with politicians of all kinds, would have spared no effort to expose and analyze the situation down to parts per million. But Rees’s was only one of many credible and well-documented warnings from scientists going back decades, including the Fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007). All were greeted with varying levels of denial, indifference, and misinterpretation, or were simply ignored altogether. It is said to be a crime to cause panic in a crowded theater by yelling “fire” without cause, but is it less criminal not to warn people when the theater is indeed burning? My starting point is the oddly tepid response by U.S. leaders at virtually all levels to global warming, more accurately described as “global destabilization.” I will be as optimistic as a careful reading of the evidence permits and assume that leaders will rouse themselves to act in time to stabilize and then reduce concentrations of greenhouse gases below the level at which we lose control of the climate altogether by the effects of what scientists call “positive carbon cycle feedbacks.” Even so, with a warming approaching or above 2°C we will not escape severe social, economic, and political trauma. In an e-mail to the author on November 19, 2007, ecologist and founder of the Woods Hole Research Center George Woodwell puts it this way: . . . There is an unfortunate fiction abroad that if we can hold the temperature rise to 2 or 3 degrees C we can accommodate the changes. The proposition is the worst of wishful thinking.

The Upshot: What Is to Be Done?

As I write, the president-elect and his advisors are pondering what to do about climate change amidst the largest and deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Their first round of decisions will have been made by the time you read this book. But whatever policy emerges in the form of cap and trade legislation, taxation, and new regulations on carbon, they are only the first steps, and they will quickly prove to be inadequate to deal with a deteriorating biophysical situation. Emerging climate realities will drive this or the next president, probably sooner rather than later, to more comprehensive measures—as a matter of national and global survival. The problem for President Obama presently is that we are running two deficits with very different time scales, dynamics, and politics. The first, which gets most of our attention, is short-term and has to do with money, credit, and how we create and account for wealth, which is to say a matter of economics. However difficult, it is probably repairable in a matter of a few years. The second is ecological. It is permanent, in significant ways irreparable, and potentially fatal to civilization. The economy, as Herman Daly has pointed out for decades, is a subsystem of the biosphere, not the other way around. Accordingly, there are shortterm solutions to the first deficit that might work for a while, but they will not restore longer-term ecological solvency and will likely make it worse. The fact is that climate destabilization is a steadily—perhaps rapidly—worsening condition with which we will have to contend for a long time to come. University of Chicago geophysicist David Archer puts it this way: . . .a 2°C warming of the global average is often considered to be a sort of danger limit benchmark. Two degrees C was chosen as a value to at least talk about, because it would be warmer than the Earth has been in millions of years. Because of the long lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere, 2°C of warming at the atmospheric CO2 peak would settle down to a bit less than 1°C, and remain so for thousands of years (Archer, 2009, pp. 146–147).

Millennial Hope

For two centuries and longer, humankind has been on a collision course with the limits of the Earth. The inertial momentum—the scale and velocity of the human enterprise—has grown so rapidly since the mid-20th century that virtually every indicator of planetary health is in decline (McNeill, 2000). Even an otherwise self-characterized “optimistic” analysis concludes that: . . . The momentum toward an unsustainable future can be reversed, but only with great difficulty. [The reversal] assumes fundamental shifts in desired lifestyles, values and technology. Yet, even under these assumptions, it takes many decades to realign human activity with a healthy environment, make poverty obsolete, and ameliorate the deep fissures that divide people. Some climate change is irrevocable, water stress will persist in many places, extinct species will not return, and lives will be lost to deprivation. (Raskin et al., 2002, pp. 94–95) . . . Considerably less optimistic, Thomas Berry concludes that “It is already determined that our children and grandchildren will live amid the ruined infrastructures of the industrial world and amid the ruins of the natural world itself ” (2006, p. 95). James Lovelock’s view is even darker: “the acceleration of the climate change now under way will sweep away the comfortable environment to which we are adapted . . . . [There is evidence of ] an imminent shift in our climate towards one that could easily be described as Hell” (2006, pp. 7, 147; The Vanishing Face of Gaia, 2009). Given such dire predictions, theologian Jack Miles, author of A History of God (2000), suggests that we begin to ponder the possibility that “the effort to produce a sustainable society has definitively failed . . . that we are irreversibly en route to extinction.” Alan Weisman, in a striking exercise of journalistic imagination, describes in The World Without Us how our infrastructure would then crumble, collapse, and finally disappear (2007). These are only a few of the recent musings about the human prospect.

Late-Night Thoughts about Democracy in the Long Emergency

Democracy, winston churchill once famously said, is the worst form of government except for all of the others ever tried. The Greeks, from whom we inherited the idea of self-government, after all, couldn’t manage it for long and fell victim to the political vices of greed, hubris, imperial overreach, and ruinous wars. In modern times it is possible, historian Walter Prescott Webb once wrote, that the upsurge of democracy in the early modern era was largely the result of the abundance of resources resulting from the discovery of the New World rather than from any general human improvement. His point was that the larger per capita ratios of land, minerals, and natural resources after 1492 reduced the pressures on governments and populations under conditions of scarcity and otherwise diverted peoples’ energies to the tasks of getting rich and getting on in the New World, the effect of which was to make us a more agreeable and more manageable lot. The ratios of resources to people, however, are now about what they were prior to the “discovery” of the New World, and the due bill for the long binge of fossil fuel–powered modernization is said to be in the mail. In a more crowded and hotter world, perhaps democracy will be “just a moment in history,” as Robert Kaplan (1997) once put it, a casualty of the failure to manage growing complexity and scarcity. Many other forces also work against democracy. Vice President Al Gore, for one, argues that decades of television and nonstop exposure to advertising have eroded our capacity for the reasoned judgment necessary for democracy and that this is a large factor in the tide of irrationality that has recently flooded our politics. Susan Jacoby, similarly, believes that we live in a “new age of unreason,” that America is “ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism,” and that Americans are “living through an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge involving everything about the way we learn and think” (2008, pp. xx, 309).

Leadership in the Long Emergency

In june of 1858 abraham lincoln began his address at Springfield, Illinois by saying, “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.” He spoke on the issue of slavery that day with a degree of honesty that other politicians were loath to practice. At Springfield he asserted that “A house divided against itself cannot stand . . . this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” His immediate targets were the evasions and complications of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the Supreme Court ruling handed down in the Dred Scott case, but particularly those whom he accused of conspiring to spread slavery to states where it did not already exist. In his speech Lincoln accused Senator Stephen Douglas, President Franklin Pierce, Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, and President James Buchanan of a conspiracy to spread slavery. This accusation was supported by circumstantial evidence such that it was “impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.” His opponent in the upcoming Senatorial election, Stephen Douglas, he described as a “caged and toothless” lion. Lincoln had begun the process of “framing” the issue of slavery without equivocation, but in a way that would still build electoral support based on logic, evidence, and eloquence. On February 27, 1860, Lincoln’s address at the Cooper Institute in New York extended and deepened the argument. He began with words from Stephen Douglas: “Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” He proceeded to analyze the historical record to infer what the “fathers” actually believed. Lincoln in a masterful and lawyerly way identified 39 of the founders who had “acted on the question” of slavery in decisions voted on in 1784, 1787, 1789, 1798, 1803, and 1820.

Governance

The u.s. constitution and the bill of rights were drafted in an agrarian era by a small group of men as collectively brilliant as any in history. The government they created was designed with checks and balances and divided authority in order to prevent executive tyranny, sometimes override popular majorities, and avoid quick action on virtually anything. From its agrarian origins it has grown incrementally ever since in response to particular issues, economic necessity, and above all war, but not as a result of much planning, foresight, or effort to create a coherent political architecture. Nonetheless, the framework they created has survived and even thrived through sectional rivalry and the Civil War, the excesses of the Robber Baron era, two world wars, and the rise and fall of fascism and communism. The Constitution, for some, is a scripture hence beyond reform. Historian Charles Beard, less reverential, once argued that it was written to protect private wealth, especially that of the founders. That may not have been as true as Beard assumed for the founders, but it is clear that “By the middle of the nineteenth century the legal system had been reshaped to the advantage of men of commerce and industry at the expense of farmers, workers, consumers, and other less powerful groups within the society” (Horwitz, 1977, pp. 253–254). More recently, political scientists Robert Dahl, Sanford Levinson, Daniel Lazare, and Larry Sabato have questioned the inclusiveness of the Constitution as well as its effectiveness and future prospects. Dahl, for example, argues that undemocratic features were built into the Constitution because the founders “overestimated the dangers of popular majorities . . . and underestimated the strength of the developing democratic commitment among Americans” (Dahl, 2002, p. 39; Lazare, 1996, p. 46). While somewhat pessimistic about the prospects for greater democratization, he argues that “it is time—long past time—to invigorate and greatly widen the critical examination of the Constitution and its shortcomings” (pp. 154–156). Constitutional law expert Sanford Levinson agrees: “the Constitution is both insufficiently democratic . . . and sufficiently dysfunctional, in terms of the quality of government that we receive . . . [that] we should no longer express our blind devotion to it” (Levinson, 2006, p. 9).

Hope at the End of Our Tether

We like optimistic people. they are fun, often funny, and very often capable of doing amazing things otherwise thought to be impossible. Were I stranded on a life raft in the middle of the ocean with the choice of an optimist or a pessimist for a companion, I’d want the optimist, providing he did not have a liking for human flesh. Optimism, however, is often rather like a Yankee fan believing that the team can win the game when it’s the bottom of the ninth and they’re up by a run with two outs, a two-strike count against a .200 hitter, and Mariano Rivera in his prime on the mound. That fan is optimistic for good reason. Cleveland Indian fans (I am one), on the other hand, believe in salvation by small percentages (if at all) and hope for a hit to get the runner home from second base and tie the game. Optimists know that the odds are in their favor; hope is the faith that things will work out whatever the odds. Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. Hopeful people are actively engaged in defying the odds or changing the odds. Optimism, on the other hand, leans back, puts its feet up, and wears a confident look, knowing that the deck is stacked. “Hope,” in Vaclav Havel’s words, “is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons . . . Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, . . . but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good” (1991, p. 181). I know of no purely rational reason for anyone to be optimistic about the human future. How can one be optimistic, for example, about global warming? First, as noted above, it isn’t a “warming,” but rather a total destabilization of the planet brought on by the behavior of one species: us.

The Spirit of Connection

The conversation about the future of humankind and the preservation of life cannot be bottled up at the level of technology, economics, and politics, which have to do with means, not ends. In a vacuum of meaning and purpose, however, we don’t do well either individually or collectively. Instead we are more likely to succumb to anomie, nihilism, and insensate violence. But questions about the purposes and the moral compass by which we might reorient ourselves have become much more complicated. At the dawn of the 20th century, optimism about the human condition abounded. Science and technology seemed to promise an unlimited future, and in various ways larger questions were set aside in the intoxication with progress, the goal to master ever more of nature, and the hive-like effort to grow economies and eventually fight two world wars. But looking back across the wars, gulags, death camps, ethnic cleansings, killing fields, and mutual assured destruction, the 20th century appears rather like a passage through Hell. Looking ahead to rapid climate destabilization, the loss of perhaps a quarter to half of the species of life on Earth, and the widening gulf of poverty and living standards, we see that it may not have been a passage at all but a road toward the abyss of extinction. But it is a mistake, I think, to regard the possible suicide of humankind as an anomaly rather than the logical outcome of a wrong turn that now must be quickly undone. For all of its complexity, the essence of the issue of sustainability was put by the writer of Deuteronomy long ago: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that thou and thy seed may live.” No previous generation could make that choice as fully and finally as we can. We have the choice of life and death before us, but now on a planetary scale. One might expect that this choice would have been a matter of considerable interest to mainstream Christian denominations, but with a few notable exceptions they have been, in scientist Stuart Simon’s word, “sluggish” to recognize such issues.

The Carbon Connection

Having seen pictures of the devastation did not prepare me for the reality of New Orleans. Mile after mile of wrecked houses, demolished cars, piles of debris, twisted and downed trees, and dried mud everywhere. We stopped every so often to look into abandoned houses in the 9th Ward and along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain to see things close up: mud lines on the walls, overturned furniture, moldy clothes still hanging in closets, broken toys, a lens from a pair of glasses . . . once cherished and useful objects rendered into junk. Each house had a red circle painted on the front to indicate the results of the search for bodies. Some houses showed the signs of desperation, such as holes punched through ceilings as people tried to escape rising water. The musty smell of decay was everywhere, overlaid with an oily stench. Despair hung like Spanish moss in the hot, dank July air. Ninety miles to the south, the Louisiana delta is rapidly sinking below the rising waters of the Gulf. This is no “natural” process but rather the result of decades of mismanagement of the lower Mississippi, which became federal policy after the great flood of 1927. Sediments that built the richest and most fecund wetlands in the world are now deposited off the continental shelf—part of an ill-conceived effort to tame the river. The result is that the remaining wetlands, starved for sediment, are both eroding and compacting, sinking below the water and perilously close to no return. Oil extraction has done most of the rest of the damage by crisscrossing the marshlands with channels that allow the intrusion of saltwater and storm surges. Wakes from boats have widened the original channels considerably, further unraveling the ecology of the region. The richest fishery in North America and a unique culture that once thrived in the delta are disappearing, and with them the buffer zone that protects New Orleans from hurricanes. “Every 2.7 miles of marsh grass,” in Mike Tidwell’s words, “absorbs a foot of a hurricane’s storm surge” (2003, p. 57).