technologyreview | “The traditional forms of living a good life were going to be
destroyed,” writes Lear. “But there was spiritual backing for the
thought that new good forms of living would arise for the Crow, if only
they would adhere to the virtues of the chickadee.”
Today the
Crow—just like the Sioux, the Navajo, the Potawatomi, and numerous other
native peoples— live in communities that struggle with poverty,
suicide, and unemployment. But these communities are also home to poets,
historians, singers, dancers, and thinkers committed to indigenous
cultural flourishing. The point here is not to glamorize indigenous
closeness to “nature,” or to indulge a naive longing for lost
hunter-warrior values, but to ask what we might learn from courageous
and intelligent people who survived cultural and ecological catastrophe.
Like Plenty Coups, we face the destruction of our conceptual reality.
Catastrophic levels of global warming are practically inevitable at
this point, and one way or another this will bring about the end of life
as we know it.
So we have to confront two distinct challenges.
The first is whether we might curtail the worst possibilities of climate
change and stave off human extinction by limiting greenhouse-gas
emissions and decreasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The second is
whether we will be able to transition to a new way of life in the world
we’ve made. Meeting the latter challenge demands mourning what we have
already lost, learning from history, finding a realistic way forward,
and committing to an idea of human flourishing beyond any hope of
knowing what form that flourishing will take. “This is a daunting form
of commitment,” Lear writes, for it is a commitment “to a goodness in
the world that transcends one’s current ability to grasp what it is.”
It
is not clear that we moderns possess the psychological and spiritual
resources to meet this challenge. Coming to terms with the situation as
it stands has already proved the struggle of a generation, and the
outcome still remains obscure. Successfully answering this existential
challenge may not even matter at all unless we immediately see
substantial reductions in global carbon emissions: recent research
suggests that at atmospheric carbon dioxide levels around 1,200 parts
per million, which we are on track to hit sometime in the next century,
changes in atmospheric turbulence may dissipate clouds that reflect
sunlight from the subtropics, adding as much as 8 °C warming on top of
the more than 4 °C warming already expected by that point. That much
warming, that quickly—12 °C within a hundred years—would be such an
abrupt and radical environmental shift that it’s difficult to imagine a
large, warm-blooded mammalian apex predator like Homo sapiens
surviving in significant numbers. Such a crisis could create a
population bottleneck like other, prehistoric bottlenecks, as many
billions of people die, or it could mean the end of our species. There’s
no real way to know what will happen except by looking at roughly
similar catastrophes in the past, which have left the Earth a graveyard
of failed species. We burn some of them to drive our cars.
Nevertheless,
the fact that our situation offers no good prospects does not absolve
us of the obligation to find a way forward. Our apocalypse is happening
day by day, and our greatest challenge is learning to live with this
truth while remaining committed to some as-yet-unimaginable form of
future human flourishing—to live with radical hope. Despite decades of
failure, a disheartening track record, ongoing paralysis, a social order
geared toward consumption and distraction, and the strong possibility
that our great-grandchildren may be the last generation of humans ever
to live on planet Earth, we must go on. We have no choice.
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