With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

When I first wrote at length about climate change, back in 1989, in a book
called Turning Up the Heat, I warned that we passengers on Spaceship
Earth could no longer sit back for the ride. We needed to get hold of the
controls or risk disaster. But it was at heart an optimistic book. I figured that
if Homo sapiens had come through the last ice age as a mere novice on the
planet, then we could make it this time, too. We had the technology; and the
economics of solving the problems wouldn't be crippling. I compared the
task to getting rid of the old London pea-soupers of half a century ago. Once
the decision was taken to act, the delivery would be relatively easy. We'd
soon be wondering why we had dawdled for so long.
Fifteen years on, the urgency of the climate crisis is much clearer, even if
the story has grown a little more complicated. But we are showing no signs
yet of acting on the scale necessary. The technology is still straightforward,
and the economics is only easier, but we can't get the politics right. Even at
this late hour, I do believe we have it in our power to set Spaceship Earth
back on the right course. But time is short. The ship is already starting to
spin out of control. We may soon lose all chance of grabbing the wheel.
Humanity faces a genuinely new situation. It is not an environmental
crisis in the accepted sense. It is a crisis for the entire life-support system of
our civilization and our species. During the past 10,000 years, since the close
of the last ice age, human civilizations have plundered and destroyed their
local environments, wrecking the natural fecundity of sizable areas of the
planet. Nevertheless, the planet's life-support system as a whole has until
now remained stable. As one civilization fell, another rose. But the rules of
the game have changed. In the Anthropocene, human influences on
planetary systems are global and pervasive.