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

late-night thoughts about democracy S 71
as merely partisan opinion. Americans, too, joined across party
lines to overcome the Great Depression of the 1930s and combat
fascism and communism. Americans have risen to meet daunting
challenges in the past, and we can do it again.
A shared national agenda that joins the public across the
political spectrum, however, cannot be built on outworn myths
and historical illusions. Our survival and that of our democracy
depend on a clearer understanding of our own ecological history
and the recognition of our disproportionate role in causing rapid
climate change. We have often thought ourselves to be a unique
and blessed people, and in some ways we may be, but a great deal
of that uniqueness is owing to the fact that our forefathers discovered
the blessings hidden in the last and greatest reserve of stored
carbon on Earth. Our soils and forests were some of the richest
anywhere, and our supplies of coal and oil seemed inexhaustible.
And rather like yeast cells feeding on sugar in a wine vat, we prospered
by exploiting carbon and depleting soils, forests, and fossil
fuels alike. As a result, we Americans release an average of 22 tons
of CO per person each year and are responsible for 28 percent
2
of the increased carbon in the atmosphere, but we make up only
5 percent of world population. In time our good fortune gave rise
to an inordinate sense of self-congratulation and the belief that, so
endowed, we must be God’s favored people. From there it was but
a short step to intoxicating doctrines of manifest destiny and later
to a foreign policy built on the idea of American supremacy. But
the access to cheap and abundant carbon led also to excesses of
overconsumption and waste, an epidemic of fatness, urban sprawl,
violence, and energy profl igacy, and lifestyles that can be neither
sustained here nor duplicated for very long elsewhere. Historian
David Potter once characterized Americans as “a people of plenty,”
but in time we became a people of excess, and we now have to fi nd
our way back to older values of thrift, frugality, neighborliness, and
what John Todd once called “elegant solutions predicated on the
uniqueness of place.” That is a homecoming of sorts.