Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

78 S politics and governance
Box 2.2. (continued)
to the attack of other ideas,” in John Kenneth Galbraith’s words,
“but to the massive onslaught of circumstances with which they
cannot contend” (2001, p. 30). That appears to be true in our
own time, in which the pecuniary imagination was given such
full reign. The convenient idea that foxes could be persuaded to
reliably guard the henhouse, for example, derived from free marketeers
like Milton Friedman, libertarians like George Gilder,
supply-side economists like Arthur Laffer, and “long-boomers”
like Peter Schwartz, did not voluntarily surrender to superior reason,
logic, or evidence. Rather, it was an idea whose consequences
turned out to be bad for both the hens and a bit later for the starving
foxes, some of whom, now professing different ideas, stand in
line for public bailouts—roadkill on the highway called reality.
The shelf life of such ideas will turn out to be brief as such fads
go, but the consequences will last a long time.
When delusion is popular, however, durable ideas are unpopular,
or more likely forgotten altogether. But in the present wreckage
we have no choice but to search for more durable ideas with more
benign or even positive consequences. When we fi nd truly durable
ideas, they are mostly about limits to what we can do or should do—
but restraint, prudence, and caution are, “oh mah God, sooo not cool”
as one of my students thoughtfully expressed it. Accordingly, such
things are put on the shelf, where they gather dust until necessity
strikes again and they are called back into use as we try once again to
fi nd our bearings amidst the debris of popular delusions gone bust.
In this regard, an ancient collection of proverbs contains these
words of the Greek poet Archilochus: “the fox knows many things;
the hedgehog knows one big thing,” Like the hedgehog, advocates
for the environment, animals, biological diversity, water, soils,
landscapes, and climate stability know one big thing, as biologist
Garrett Hardin once put it, which is that “we can never do merely
one thing” (Hardin, 1972, p. 38). In other words, there are many
unforeseen consequences from what we do, and so there are limits
to what we can safely do. Since consequences are not only unpredictable
but often remote in time and distant from the cause, we