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

millennial hope S 169
in human behavior. For all of the evidence of human depravity,
there are countless cases to the contrary. Villagers in Le Chambonsur-Lignon,
France, for one example, at great risk to themselves,
hid Jews from Nazis in World War II (Hallie, 1994). John Rabe, a
German citizen living in war-torn Nanking in the 1930s, risked
his life to maintain an international safety zone for civilians whose
lives were at risk, thereby saving 200,000 Chinese from certain
death (Rabe, 2000). Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl testifi es to
the endurance and resilience of prisoners in the midst of unspeakable
horrors (2004). In the death camps Tzvetan Todorov found
“many more acts of kindness than those recognized by the traditional
moral perspective . . . even under the most adverse circumstances
imaginable, when men and women are faint with hunger,
numb with cold, exhausted, beaten, and humiliated, they still go
on performing simple acts of kindness—not everyone and not all
the time, but enough to reinforce and even augment our faith in
goodness” (1996, pp. 290–291). The lesson, he argues, is that “moral
reactions are spontaneous, omnipresent, and eradicable only with
the greatest violence” (p. 39). Many war heroes risked their lives
for fellow soldiers. There is the everyday heroism of police, fi refi
ghters, teachers, and parents who do remarkable things without
expecting any tangible reward. And contrary to economic models,
there is the everyday kindness of strangers that defi es calculations
of self-interest.
Good evidence exists, as well, that we have an affi nity for life—
what E. O. Wilson calls “biophilia.” And it would be surprising
indeed, after several million years of evolution, were it otherwise.
But the study of the ecological foundations of human psychology,
beginning with the provocative work of Theodore Roszak (1992),
is presently marginalized by mainstream psychology. A few scholars
are studying why and how people connect to nature and why that
is important for our well-being. Mayer and Frantz, for example,
show that the experiential sense of feeling connected to nature is
associated not only with greater happiness and meaningfulness in