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

millennial hope S 161
property assets, establish the rights of posterity to life, liberty, and
property, and build a global community based on nonviolence,
law, and fairness will create the political foundation necessary for
recovery. These are the fi rst steps of what Snyder calls a thousandyear
journey. All of this is to say that genuine hope is neither passive
nor resigned. To the contrary, hope means putting aside all
of those traits of mind and character that prevent us from getting
down to work with ingenuity, persistence, and good heart while
understanding that the journey will be long and diffi cult. And
there’s the rub.
Are we, in the main, the kind of people who can face diffi cult
realities and not fl inch? Can we overcome the tendency to settle
for half-truths and evade the reality settling in about us? In short,
do we have the collective intelligence, courage, stamina, and heart
to surmount the challenges ahead? No one can say for certain.
What can be said is that our best chance to accomplish the great
work ahead depends on a deep understanding of our potentials for
good and evil and the cultivation of our higher capacities for wisdom,
foresight, and altruism. Who are we and what do we know
of ourselves? To successfully navigate the decades and centuries
of the long emergency will require that we answer that question
without illusions, but also without selling ourselves short.
Much of the talk about the challenge of sustainability skips
around the nastier side of our nature. That evasion misleads us
to think that we can get off the hook cheaply with only a little
more cleverness. Against that view, others are beginning to see the
impending crisis of climate destabilization as primarily a matter
of morality, not economics or technology (Hillman, Fawcett, and
Rajan, 2007, p. 243; Gelbspan, 2004, p. 181; Garvey, 2008). But that
does not make our choices easier; to the contrary. As Nietzsche
argued in The Genealogy of Morals, “morality will gradually perish
now,” and the history of the subsequent century seemed to confi
rm his pessimism as we stumbled from the slaughter of World
War I to Auschwitz, Dresden, the Gulag, Hiroshima, Vietnam, the