Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change”
describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic
climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false
hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional
knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that
those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to
insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few
years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending
disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite
will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as
difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential
struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and
emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.
The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has
been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering,
looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the
indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The
technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled
luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the
industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for
ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a
death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems
unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record
keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual
creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound
ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report
of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.
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