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

chapter 6
Millennial Hope
The gods and demons have not disappeared at all, they have merely
got new names.
—Carl Jung
There is but one way to save ourselves from this hell: to leave the
prison of our egocentricity, to reach out and to one ourselves with the
world.
—Erich Fromm
I am unwilling to believe that this whole civilization is no more
than a blind alley of history and a fatal error of the human spirit.
—Vaclav Havel
For two centuries and longer, humankind has
z
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 diffi culty. [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