"It's not just our infrastructure that’s built for a different time, it’s our mindset. Whether it’s the depth of the snow, the volume of the rainfall, or the speed of the flames, when it comes to extreme weather, our heads are still in the 20th century.
There is actually a name for this phenomenon: the Lucretius Problem. Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) was a Roman poet and philosopher who identified this cognitive disconnect more than 2000 years ago. Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, paraphrases Lucretius this way: “The fool believes the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest he has observed.” In essence, the Lucretius Problem is rooted in the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience."
* * *
"Baffling to those trying to communicate the hazards of 21st century weather is the way in which responsible authorities continually underestimate accurate predictions, despite persistent warnings (over decades now), that we must expect lethal and unfamiliar extremes from every kind of weather. Most dismaying to climate scientists and weather analysts is how each of these failures mirrors, in microcosm, our collective failure to prepare for the larger, systemic threats posed by global climate disruption. In March, the IPCC issued its latest report, which said, in effect, Time’s up! on the supreme challenge of cutting CO2 emissions. As she watched this red alert from world-class scientists slip down the rankings on The New York Times homepage, a scholar and climate activist named Genevieve Guenther tweeted, 'It's utterly surreal, the dissonance.'"
— "Even As Smoke Engulfs Us, We Can't Wrap Our Heads Around Climate Change", John Vaillaint, Time Magazine, June 7, 2023. Adapted from Vaillant’s Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
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"Rabbi Pinhas' disciples said, 'We are afraid that the Evil-Urge will pursue us.' Rabbi Pinhas replied, 'Don't worry. You have not gotten high enough for it to pursue you. For the time being, you are still pursuing it.'"
— Samuel H. Dresner. Prayer, Humility, and Compassion. Hartford: Hartmore House, 1957 (reprinted 1969), 121.
Go way back — to 400,000 years ago, say — and you would find lions, elephants, and other exotic fauna grazing on arid plains [in Europe]. ... Remarkably, what brought those animals to this part of the world was a climate just 3 degrees Celsius or so warmer than today. There are people alive now who will live in a Britain that warm again.
— Bill Bryson. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: DoubleDay, 2010. p. 451.
“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”
— Henry David Thoreau, quoted in “Sunbeams,” The Sun, December 2012, p. 48.
“What are the cultural mythologies of our time? How do they cloud our ability to think through these issues?
The notion that history encodes progress, however erratic, is something that may appear to future generations a projection of impossible naivety and narcissism. Our sense that every generation is going to live differently, let alone better, is really a projection of the last couple hundred years in the West. I think it is quite possible that we will look back on it — as soon as 50 years from now — as a really weird anomaly, this strange idea that we ever expected that the world could continue providing ever more abundance for us."
— “The Strange Optimism of Climate Alarmist David Wallace-Wells.” Rick Carp. Rolling Stone. March 12, 2019.
“As the threats of suicide piled up, I began to see a coordinated campaign to harass me, and as disturbing as it was, it was also sadly fascinating in what it revealed. These men were trying to terrorize me with what they saw as the only logical conclusion to my anti-racist, feminist work: the mass suicide of white men. They wanted me to know that they saw my work to end violent misogyny and white supremacy, and they saw that it was a threat, not only to their norms and their status but to their very lives.
These men wanted me to know that they were miserable, they felt screwed over, and they felt demonized. They wanted me to know that the only option available to address white male patriarchy was either to maintain the status quo that was making us all miserable, or death. They wanted me to know that they were not capable of growth or change and that any attempts to bring about that growth or change would end them.
Nobody is more pessimistic about white men than white men."
— Ijeoma Oluo. “The White Men Who Threaten Me With Their Own Suicide.” Medium: GEN. December 1, 2020.
“today, a forest caught fire and it will scorch for days. weeks. the whole park will become an oven. so much fur singed. so many hibernations interrupted. today, all the bees died and no one said a thing.”
— Sara Ryan. “This is a Time Capsule.” Excellent Evidence of Human Activity. Denver: The Cupboard, 2019. Vol. 38.
"It has long been thought that environmental crises are, in part or in sum, crises of narrative, which is to say crises of belief. At least as far back as Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), critics and commentators have been calling for new stories, new myths, and new symbols with which to better fit ourselves to the world not of economy, whose false narratives have led us to apocalypse, but of truth, of science — a call that has taken on a note of alarm in the era of global warming; we need those new narratives now. If only we can get the story right, runs the liturgical refrain of an enormous number of op-eds, scientific papers, academic panels, TED talks, white papers, think pieces, essays, books, and tweets from across the ideological spectrum — if only we can flip the script to fit the facts, then we can save the planet and ourselves.
* * *
Jeremiah's time has passed. Both Carbon Ideologies and The Uninhabitable Earth seem to sense it: believing the right narrative and having the right facts were never going to be enough. There may be no absolution for what we have done. In my life, I’ve worked with a MacArthur genius and a researcher who split the Nobel Prize for his climate work; I’ve shared my writing with dozens of devoted ecocritics and environmental humanists, green essayists and poets, and journalists and editors — true believers, all — and none of them, none of us, not with the millions of pages we've read between us, the stats, facts, and library stacks we’ve combed, not one of us lives as if the words we’ve read matter.
And I wonder: what, now, in the Anthropocene, is the point of reading?"
— “Reading in the Anthropocene.” Daegan Miller. Guernica. June 16, 2021.
"As it has been mentioned, the main difficulty in replacing the industrial order is not the physical nature of the situation, but its psychic entrancement. This mythic commitment preceded the actuality of the industrial achievement. It was, rather, a condition for, not the consequence of, the industrial achievement. So, too, with the ecological pattern: the myth is primary, although its early realization must be achieved and valid indications established of its possibilities for the future. A taste for existence with in the functioning of the natural world is urgent. Without a fascination with the grandeur of the North American continent, the energy needed for its preservation will never be developed. Something more than the utilitarian aspect of fresh water must be evoked if we are ever to have water with the purity required for our survival. There must be a mystique of the rain if we are ever to restore the purity of the rainfall."
— Thomas Berry. The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988. p 33.
"Environmentalists are not likely to make significant headway in mobilizing the rest of us to lower our own levels of consumption unless environmentalism can challenge the rip-off consciousness and the selfishness of the competitive marketplace. What the environmental movement has failed to emphasize is a nonutilitarian, nonreductionist, nonmaterialist view of the earth — the possibility of a consciousness that does not reduce everything to the question 'What's in it for me?'"
— Michael Lerner. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. p. 74.
"They have called, for example, for UK carbon emissions to be reduced to net zero by 2025. Wouldn’t it be better, we asked, to pursue some intermediate aims?
* * *
Softer aims might be politically realistic, but they are physically unrealistic. Only shifts commensurate with the scale of our existential crises have any prospect of averting them. Hopeless realism, tinkering at the edges of the problem, got us into this mess. It will not get us out.
Public figures talk and act as if environmental change will be linear and gradual. But the Earth’s systems are highly complex, and complex systems do not respond to pressure in linear ways. When these systems interact (because the world’s atmosphere, oceans, land surface and lifeforms do not sit placidly within the boxes that make study more convenient), their reactions to change become highly unpredictable. Small perturbations can ramify wildly. Tipping points are likely to remain invisible until we have passed them. We could see changes of state so abrupt and profound that no continuity can be safely assumed.
* * *
Decades of institutional failure ensures that only “unrealistic” proposals — the repurposing of economic life, with immediate effect — now have a realistic chance of stopping the planetary death spiral. And only those who stand outside the failed institutions can lead this effort.
Two tasks need to be performed simultaneously: throwing ourselves at the possibility of averting collapse, as Extinction Rebellion is doing, slight though this possibility may appear; and preparing ourselves for the likely failure of these efforts, terrifying as this prospect is. Both tasks require a complete revision of our relationship with the living planet.
* * *
Because we cannot save ourselves without contesting oligarchic control, the fight for democracy and justice and the fight against environmental breakdown are one and the same. Do not allow those who have caused this crisis to define the limits of political action. Do not allow those whose magical thinking got us into this mess to tell us what can and cannot be done."
— "The Earth Is in a Death Spiral. It Will Take Radical Action to Save Us", The Guardian, Nov 15, 2018
"There is a lot of talk these days about the need to lead lower-carbon lifestyles. There is also a lot of finger-pointing going on and, some argue, virtue signaling. But who is truly walking the climate walk? The carnivore who doesn’t fly? The vegan who travels to see family abroad? If nobody is without carbon sin, who gets to cast the first lump of coal?
* * *
However, the true solution, pricing carbon, requires policy change.
* * *
But appearing to force Americans to give up meat, or travel, or other things central to the lifestyle they’ve chosen to live is politically dangerous: it plays right into the hands of climate-change deniers whose strategy tends to be to portray climate champions as freedom-hating totalitarians.
* * *
But a price on carbon needs to be designed such that marginalized communities most at risk from climate impacts aren’t adversely impacted economically as well.
— “Lifestyle Changes Aren’t Enough to Save the Planet. Here’s What Could.” Michael E. Mann. Time. September 12, 2019.
"What we call 'Climate Leviathan' exists to the extent that some sovereign — a body evolving out of the UN’s climate frameworks, perhaps — exists who can invoke the exception, declare an emergency, and decide who may emit carbon and who cannot. This sovereign must be planetary in a dual sense: capable of acting both at the planetary scale (since climate change is understood as a massive collective action problem) and in the name of planetary management for the sake of life on Earth. A task of biblical proportions, amounting to an impossible global accounting of everything, like determining 'a weight for the wind and apportion[ing] the waters by measure,' to quote the book of Job.
Climate Leviathan is defined by this dream of a planetary sovereign. It’s a regulatory authority armed with democratic legitimacy, binding technical authority on scientific issues, and a panopticonlike capacity to monitor the vital granular elements of our emerging world: fresh water, carbon emissions, climate refugees, and so on.
* * *
Leviathan could take one of two broad forms. On one hand, a variety of authoritarian territorial sovereignty could emerge in nations or regions where political-economic conditions prove amenable to transcending capital. On the other hand, we could see Leviathan emerge as the means by which to perpetuate the rule of northern liberal, democratic capitalist states.
* * *
Climate Leviathan will be the fundamental regulatory ideal motivating elites in the near future. Still, it is neither inevitable nor invincible; it is strong and coherent but not uncontested. It is threatened from within by the usual burdens of any state-capitalist project divided by multiple accumulation strategies, and it is almost impossible to imagine that it will actually reverse climate change."
— "The Age of Climate Authoritarianism Is Upon Us", Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, OneZero, Jan 28, 2020
"We save only what we love, we love only what we understand, we understand only what we are taught."
— Baba Diome, Senegalese naturalist
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