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

the spirit of connection S 145
promise to improve? Is there any evidence that we are doing better
or that we will do better? Is there a kind of middle sentence
between life and death? Under what terms could humankind
receive a contingent life sentence or probation?
The trial, like philosopher John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance,” is
a heuristic device to help us see what we might otherwise miss.
But it is more than that. It is an invitation to ask those age-old
questions, now more important than ever, about what we are and
where we are going.
There will, of course, be no trial, no parole, and no contingent
sentence, only an eerie and deepening silence as species disappear—unless
and until we shift course. As my students know as
well, there are profoundly important efforts under way to change
our course along with formidable sources of resistance and the
brute inertial momentum of industrial civilization. The difference
between these outcomes depends to a great extent on whether
humanity is capable of quickly learning new behaviors appropriate
to a planet with a biosphere and a higher vision of what we could
become. Is there in us a promise of something more? Perhaps we
have, as Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams suggest, a “sacred opportunity
. . . a chance to be heroes . . . to become the kind of people
capable of using science to uphold a globally inclusive, long-lived
civilization” (2006, pp. 295–297). But science on its own won’t
save us in the absence of a renewed sense of the sacred suffi ciently
powerful to overcome our indifference to Earth, which is to say
absent a change of heart.
Perhaps we are not alone in this effort. Philosopher and theologian
Thomas Berry, for one, believes that “We are not left simply
to our own rational contrivances [but] are supported by the
ultimate powers of the universe” (1988, p. 211). In contrast to the
story of human conquest and progress, Berry and cosmologist
Brian Swimme propose that we better fi t a different and larger
narrative in which humankind is a part of a still-evolving universe
(Swimme and Berry, 1992). Against the vastness of cosmic