To that subtitle's scary rhetorical question, last night's "debate" debacle might frighten some with the growing likelihood of an affirmative reply. If this is a game, can we really be in the late innings already? The season just got started. Today at least I'm retreating to those green fields of the mind, in hopes of greening my resolve for the climate fight and the political fight of our lives just ahead.
McKibben's work with 350.org shows that "enormous events can happen quickly," humans can mobilize and sway hearts and minds more rapidly than we realize. Good thing, because (as he wrote almost three decades ago now, "in the last three decades, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased more than 10%... to more than 350 parts per million." That's alarming. And it's alarming that it's taken decades to alarm more of us, but suddenly people are waking up.
A brief excerpt from Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age raises the specter of genetic engineering, but there is a sense in which a radically altered climate may also deprive our heirs of "context—meaning—for [their lives]." That's what seems most to motivate McKibben, the worry that we're in the process of saddling our successors with a meaning-deficit they'll not be able to cover.
That, and the dawning recognition that "the invention of the idea of economic growth" is "almost as significant as the invention of fossil fuel power" in its impact on our world. By the end of the '70s, he notes, Americans were evenly split on that issue while most were "highly uncertain" that we should commit ourselves to an ever-expanding but shallow economy. Then followed the Reagan "revolution" and its growth rhetoric. Where are we now? It seems that more of us lately are thinking seriously about the "deep economy" that finds "enough" in lives of long-term sustainability and close local community. More of us are questioning the idea that our only true measure is individual "success," more are opening our eyes to "the physicalness of the world," more "lament the notion that wildness is vanishing—that every last place had been touched by a human hand"...
I credit my discovery in 1989 of McKibben's End of Nature, "the first book for a general audience about global warming," with first waking me to the climate crisis. I've been reading and taking inspiration from him ever since. So I've suggested we spend a class on a bit of his backlist (more at his website), before proceeding to Falter. The story of McKibben's own transition from author to author-activist is itself an inspiration that might embolden some of us not to falter in the fight. This game's stakes are too high, despair is too indulgent.
McKibben's work with 350.org shows that "enormous events can happen quickly," humans can mobilize and sway hearts and minds more rapidly than we realize. Good thing, because (as he wrote almost three decades ago now, "in the last three decades, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased more than 10%... to more than 350 parts per million." That's alarming. And it's alarming that it's taken decades to alarm more of us, but suddenly people are waking up.
A brief excerpt from Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age raises the specter of genetic engineering, but there is a sense in which a radically altered climate may also deprive our heirs of "context—meaning—for [their lives]." That's what seems most to motivate McKibben, the worry that we're in the process of saddling our successors with a meaning-deficit they'll not be able to cover.
That, and the dawning recognition that "the invention of the idea of economic growth" is "almost as significant as the invention of fossil fuel power" in its impact on our world. By the end of the '70s, he notes, Americans were evenly split on that issue while most were "highly uncertain" that we should commit ourselves to an ever-expanding but shallow economy. Then followed the Reagan "revolution" and its growth rhetoric. Where are we now? It seems that more of us lately are thinking seriously about the "deep economy" that finds "enough" in lives of long-term sustainability and close local community. More of us are questioning the idea that our only true measure is individual "success," more are opening our eyes to "the physicalness of the world," more "lament the notion that wildness is vanishing—that every last place had been touched by a human hand"...
Falter paints a bleak picture, but McKibben also pictures an alternate possible world, vastly altered but not decimated, in a fantasy daydream from last September which he contributed to Time's climate forecast issue. How quickly things do change: nothing there about COVID, and he imagines a turning point in the 2020 election of a woman president. But maybe the vision isn't entirely clouded? We'll talk in class about how plausibly we think we might still hope to dream the dream of “Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different”...
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