Next Big Steps on Climate

My 2004 book, Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment, was very critical of the approach being taken to address climate change at the international level. I warned it was not working then and would not work in the future, and I called for a very different approach. 

 

Twenty years have now passed, and Yale University Press asked me to reflect on the book, its continuing relevance, and our current predicament. That started me thinking, and this essay is the result.  

 

All of my Essays from the Edge will be posted at

https://democracycollaborative.org/blog.

  

(Essay # 4)

 

Despite Red Sky at Morning’s good reception in the New York Times, The Economist, and elsewhere, its warnings in 2004 that we were on the wrong track in addressing the climate threat have gone largely unheeded. Of course, I cannot say my proposals would have done the trick, but I do believe they offered alternatives that would have greatly helped, and could still. That said, it is time for a new era of solutions that can rid the world of the greenhouse gas emissions ruining the planet.

 

A bit of background here will provide context. In 1980 I was chair of President Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality. That was the year that climate change moved from science into the public policy arena, with Carter calling it a “preeminent environmental challenge of the next decade” in an important address that year. Please note the ancient date!

 

This foresight was confirmed twelve years later when an international climate treaty was signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.  Over the next decade my concern grew that the international community had in fact adopted a flawed, weak approach to climate change and several other major global environmental threats like biodiversity loss. That concern was the origin of Red Sky at Morning two years later.

 

In the Preface to the book, I wrote that “the current system of international efforts to help the environment simply isn’t working. The design makes sure it won’t work, and the statistics keep getting worse.”

 

The overarching conclusion of Red Sky was that “the response that the international community has mounted has been flawed: the root causes have not been addressed seriously, weak multilateral institutions have been created, consensus-based negotiating procedures have ensured mostly toothless treaties, and the economic and political context in which treaties must be prepared and implemented has been largely ignored.” It was quite an indictment.

 

A particular focus of my critique was the climate treaty process, in which the international community had invested so much. Fast forward twenty years to today, the conference of the parties to the climate treaty (COP) has now met 28 times, the most recent annual meeting in Dubai attracting over 80,000 participants, including 2500 fossil fuel lobbyists! Unfortunately, the size of its crowds bears no resemblance to the COPs’ actual accomplishments. The climate treaty COPs have not been a waste of time, but they have surely wasted a lot of time, decades of it.

 

At COP 21 in Paris in 2015, the treaty process gave birth to its main achievement, the Paris Accords, which Trump infamously abandoned but Biden promptly rejoined. The Accords have done some important things: setting the well-known goal of preventing warming from exceeding 2° C while trying to stay below 1.5° C, mobilizing countries to come forward with pledges for greenhouse gas reductions, and launching programs for monitoring progress.

Last year was a moment for taking stock in the Accords and global climate action. A number of sophisticated assessments found that country pledges were woefully inadequate to meet the Accords’ goals. Worse, perhaps, as the senior UN official in charge of the treaty noted, “governments combined are taking baby steps to avert the climate crisis.” In one of the most comprehensive studies, the researchers found that “Only 1 of 42 indicators assessed—the share of electric vehicles in passenger car sales—is on track to reach its 2030 target.”  The World Resources Institute, where I was president for its first decade, had this to say: “The United Nations’ polite prose glosses over what is a truly damning report card for global climate efforts. Carbon emissions? Still climbing. Rich countries’ finance commitments? Delinquent. Adaptation support? Lagging woefully behind.”

For many reasons, the international community has failed to rise to the climate challenge. Those reasons include, especially, pushback from the powerful fossil fuel industry. Consider that more than three decades after the famous climate treaty was signed at Rio, the world is still deeply dependent on fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas, the main villains in global warming. For both the United States and the world, our energy still comes 80 percent from fossil fuels. In 2023 both global greenhouse gas emissions and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were the highest ever. The week of July 21, 2024 saw several of the hottest days ever recorded.

 

Societies everywhere now face increasingly dire situations. Climate change is often called an existential threat, but few appreciate how true that is. A new and frightening world is unfolding around us.

 

New Solutions

 

I suppose Red Sky could have stopped with the critique, but I felt obligated to write a second half of the book on what I thought should be done. I pointed out that there were available models of successful international regulation and issue management to draw from, and an attractive proposal for a World Environment Organization was making the rounds in world capitals.  A revamping of the treaty process to make it truly regulatory and functional was only one of the “8-Fold Way” that Red Sky recommended. 

 

The last of the eight initiatives I urged—“the most fundamental transition of all”—was the compelling need for a transition in values and consciousness. I quoted the remarkable Earth Charter: “Fundamental changes are needed in our values, institutions, and ways of living.” We know now from much experience that value change is something we can bring about, not something we must just await.

 

My critique still stands, I think, and there are good pointers for today in Red Sky. But we need a new era of innovative international collaboration in the fight against climate devastation. It is time to design new and implement existing solutions that can rid the world of the greenhouse gas emissions ruining the planet.

 

Americans naturally focus on US greenhouse gas emissions, which remain huge and demand curtailment, but today almost 90 percent of global emissions come from outside the United States. This reality underscores how critical it is for the US government and our citizen groups to focus internationally.

 

Here are some ripe targets for innovative international action. During the past eight years the world's big banks have pumped more than $7 trillion into the global fossil fuel business, JP Morgan Chase and Citibank among the worst of them. It is insane for this to continue. Several states, including New York and California, are pursuing legislation to force fossil fuel companies to pay for climate damages. Vermont now has such legislation. Everywhere, we should make the polluters pay!

 

Across the pond, Europe has adopted a new system of carbon border tariffs to protect its companies from unfair competition from imports from countries without carbon controls. That will put real pressure on the laggards.  To address the financing needed in the developing world, the Bridgetown Initiative proposes a new global financial architecture to make a lot more money available and to create financial guarantors for larger private sector funding. As has happened with the treaty to protect the ozone layer, other treaties can be mobilized to help with climate. The Convention on Biological Diversity should be next.

 

The international community needs urgently to pursue new ways of tackling greenhouse gas emissions, like going after the big banks. New avenues have been proposed and more should be developed. The treaty process with its endless conferences needs to be revamped. This comprehensive effort should be a major, priority project of all those institutions and individuals now in the fight against climate change.

 

Some Reasons for Hope on the Homefront

 

After Red Sky at Morning, I wrote two other books at Yale Press, The Bridge at the Edge of the World (2008) and America the Possible (2012). They both dealt with the American scene, not the international one, and they both began by describing national challenges that have deepened and worsened in the ensuing years. I tried in both books to understand America’s mounting problems—environmental, social, and political—and to explore how they might be addressed. Most of the problems we see all around us today were clearly visible then, including of course climate change.

 

I came to a difficult conclusion in writing these two books. In America the Possible I noted that “when big problems emerge across the entire spectrum of national life, it cannot be for small reasons.” My conclusion was that the unfortunate conditions we faced then and still do—the decay in American society, politics, and environment—stem from basic flaws in our economic and political systems.

 

The priorities of our economic system, and the political system supporting it, include ramping up GDP, growing corporate profits, focusing investments on high financial returns (rather than social and environmental returns), keeping labor markets slack, promoting boundless consumerism, sustaining great bastions of corporate political and economic power, ignoring issues of income distribution, and projecting overwhelming military strength abroad. This complex is reinforced by a flawed, plutocratic democracy and by dominant cultural values that remain severely materialistic, individualistic, and anthropocentric.

 

In other words, while there are many things we should do of a reformist nature, sustained progress on America’s great challenges requires deep, transformative change. That is a very sobering thought.

 

I do join those of us who sometimes get discouraged. From such desperate moments I try to rescue the ground for hope—not hopium but plausible hope. Let me relate some of the things that now give me hope.

 

The past twenty years have seen a flourishing of creative efforts to explore futures that involve transformation in our interlinked economic and political systems—our political economy. Doubts about the current order are increasing, and calls for transformative change grow louder. I love the frequent climate protest banner: “System change, not climate change.” 

 

Recognizing that such deep change will take time, efforts there have been complemented by the pursuit of near-term avenues for progress.  First off, there is a rebirth of protest in America. Activism is increasing, including labor and climate activism and activism among the young, the marginalized, and the victims. Aversion to “socialist” ideas is fading, at least for young people. Economic democracy is in the air. Bernie almost won the Democratic nomination in 2016. Recent affirmations of government action, like the successful Inflation Reduction Act, challenge the hold of market fundamentalism. The conventional wisdom that markets are good and government bad may be on the way out.

 

Meanwhile, the public, the media, and progressive politicians are finally alert to the rising menace of climate change. The Biden Administration has recently issued a flurry of impressive climate regulations. Here and abroad, the growth of renewable energy is extraordinary, especially its phenomenal takeoff in China. China is building renewable energy equivalent to five nuclear power plants every week! Ongoing stalemates in Washington are countered at least partially by impressive initiatives by some states and localities. Interest in new indicators of well-being is growing, including development of alternatives to GDP as a measure of progress.

 

The threat to democracy is recognized, and the fight for a democratic future is joined. The climate challenge is underscoring the imperative of a strong, effective government of, by, and for the people. And more and more people are seeing the root of many problems in misguided dominant values. They are searching for new values and new lives to go with them. We often find our faith communities at the forefront of these efforts.

 

So, I say all is not lost. It is not over yet. I believe the positive currents driving toward meaningful change can strengthen in the future. But there is a major problem on that front. These positive currents would be greatly weakened and slowed in a second Trump presidency, much as climate and other progress was derailed in the first.  Our democracy and our climate are both at stake in this election.

 

My big hope is for progressives to leave behind their issue silos, come together, and forge a mighty political force, both for immediate action and for deep, transformative change. We need a fusion of forces, a movement of movements. That would be new and could make a world of difference.

For more on the author, see www.gusspeth.org.

The Essays from the Edge are being posted at https://www.democracycollaborative.org/blogs.

From Growth Fetish to Post-Growth

(Essay #3)

My family and I spent 25 years in Washington DC. They were good years, and every morning I began with coffee and the Washington Post. The newspaper was a wonderful companion — and reliably progressive. But there is something going on there now, on the Editorial Board, that I find, well, weird.

 

The Post has now published several editorials that reflect antipathy towards what environmentalists and climate advocates are trying to accomplish. The most recent, and one that got me concerned again, is “Ending Growth Won’t Save the Planet.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/21/degrowth-climate

I have read it several times, trying to understand. The Editorial Board is eager to make the case that Growth Is Good and that America should keep striving for it. It’s amazing that the Post feels the need to defend economic growth. News Flash! The Washington Post thinks growth is in trouble! The editorial is clear: its worry is that climate concern will drive an attack on growth.

 

And what better whipping boy, on whose back to make their case, than the tiny “degrowth” movement? Called decroissance in France, degrowth has some thoughtful advocates in Europe. But here, its proponents are so far from political relevance that their voice cannot be heard. Still, the Post can’t resist: “’Degrowth’ — the brand name for neo-Malthusianism — ignores how ingenuity and innovation have repeatedly empowered humanity to overcome ecological constraints.” Mostly, of course, we have bulldozed ecological constraints away, but that is a story for a little later.

 

The editorial casts a disdainful eye on growth critics like Naomi Klein, Greta Thunberg, and even Pope Francis. It makes light of esteemed figures like Herman Daly and Paul Ehrlich. I believe this confirms that the Post’s concern is not really the miniscule degrowth movement but those who are scoring points on the prevailing pro-growth orthodoxy.

 

Were I prominent enough, the Post could certainly have included me on its list. That would have made me very happy. In several books and numerous articles, I have joined the critics of economic growth as it is currently defined and practiced. So, naturally, I feel called to respond now. 

 

Hardly anyone would favor the version of degrowth in the Post’s caricature.  I do advocate what I and many others have called a post-growth society. To me that is the view that economic growth — by which I mean GDP growth — should no longer be an important national policy objective. 

 

That is plain heresy, of course. Not much in our society is more faithfully followed than the gospel of economic growth. To know what growth critics are up against, consider this remarkable passage from J. R. McNeill’s environmental history of the twentieth century, Something New Under the Sun. He writes that the "growth fetish" solidified its hold on imaginations and institutions in the twentieth century: “Social, moral, and ecological ills were sustained in the interest of economic growth; indeed, adherents to the faith proposed that only more growth could resolve such ills. Economic growth became the indispensable ideology of the state nearly everywhere. ... The overarching priority of economic growth was easily the most important idea of the twentieth century."

(Essay #3)

Despite the heresy, I want to offer five reasons why I think the Post should reconsider and join us in questioning GDP growth as a national priority. Five is a lot, but the points are short — and important. 

 

First, our measure of growth, Gross Domestic Product, is terribly flawed and should be pushed off its exalted pedestal. GDP should stand for Grossly Distorted Picture. Never mind that GDP is simply a cumulative measure of all activity in the formal economy — good things and bad things, costs and benefits, mere market activity, money changing hands, busyness in the economy — for the bigger it gets, the greater the private profit and public revenue. Never mind also that even the creator of its formalisms, Simon Kuznets, warned in the 1930s that "Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth. … Goals for ‘more' growth should specify more growth of what and for what." 

 

Though it is still very much on its pedestal, GDP's continued reign must be challenged, and many economists agree. Favoring growth when that growth is measured by GDP is a tragic blunder. 

 

What we need is a dashboard of alternative indicators. It should include (1) measures of true economic progress that correct and adjust GDP so that we can gauge sustainable economic and environmental welfare, (2) indicators of objective social wellbeing such as the status of health, education, and economic security, (3) indexes of environmental conditions and trends, (4) indicators of democratic performance, and (5) measures of subjective wellbeing such as life satisfaction, happiness, and trust. Here is good news: indicators of all these types have already been developed!

 

The first of the above indicators responds to society's need for a monetized measure that corrects the shortcomings of GDP. Such a measure could then be compared to uncorrected GDP on a regular, quarterly basis.  The results of country studies using such a measure show changes in public welfare eventually flatlining while GDP continues to grow, not producing additional wellbeing.  

 

That leads to the second point: GDP growth doesn’t deliver the claimed social and economic benefits. Since 1980, real GDP in the United States has tripled, and per capita GDP has doubled. Phenomenal growth! You would think America would be a paradise. But during this period real hourly wages of US workers hardly budged, stagnating while the pay at the top skyrocketed as did a vast inequality. Simultaneously, life satisfaction flatlined, social capital eroded, families lived paycheck to paycheck, and the environment declined. Over this period, the US dropped from the No.1 country on the UN’s Human Development Index to No.21. As I describe in what follows, desperately seeking more GDP growth is unlikely to yield better results. 

 

My third concern is a major one: the overriding imperative to grow gives overriding power to those, mainly the corporations, that have the capital and technology to deliver that growth. And, much the same thing, the growth imperative wars against a long list of public policies that would improve national wellbeing but are said to "slow growth" and to "hurt the economy." 

 

Such policies include shorter workweeks and longer vacations; greater labor protections, including a living minimum wage, protection of labor's right to organize, and generous parental leaves; guarantees to part-time workers; new incentives for a twenty-first-century corporation, one that embraces rechartering, new ownership patterns, and stakeholder primacy rather than shareholder primacy; restrictions on advertising; incentives for local and locally owned production and consumption; strong social and environmental provisions in trade agreements; rigorous environmental, health, and consumer protection; greater economic equality with genuinely progressive taxation of the rich and greater income support for the poor; increased spending on neglected public services; and powerful initiatives to sharply curb greenhouse gas emissions nationally and globally.  

 

Taken together, these policies would undoubtedly slow GDP growth, but quality of life would improve, and that's what matters.

 

Fourth, the growth imperative reinforces our dreadful consumerism. Recall that GDP is 70 percent consumer spending. American consumerism is definitely pathological but essential to keep the current system going. The New York Times ran a story a while back that summed up the matter nicely: “Why Americans Must Keep Spending — Households perceive an endless stream of needs, and besides, the economy depends on it.” 

 

In my book America the Possible I discuss a series of policy changes that could curb our consumerist addiction, but here I want to stress something else. Our search for meaning and belonging through having more material things deflects us from pursuing the real sources of happiness and satisfaction: close ties in families and with friends, development of skills and talents, informal education, helping others and volunteering, exposure to the natural world, sports and play, and even politics. Many people do sense that today there is a great misdirection of life’s energy and that, as Martin Seligman said, “Materialism is toxic to happiness.”

 

My fifth and final point, of course, is that economic activity and its growth are the principal drivers of massive, continuing environmental decline. The economy consumes natural resources (both renewable and nonrenewable resources), occupies the land, and releases pollutants. As the economy has grown, so has biological impoverishment and pollutants of great variety, including a handful of greenhouse gases. Economist Paul Ekins observed that "The sacrifice of the environment to economic growth. . . has unquestionably been a feature of economic development at least since the birth of industrialism." 

 

Of late, there has been serious work done to see if societies can have it both ways: can growth go up while environmental destruction goes down? This challenging possibility has been called “green growth.” That may be what the Post is advocating, but the Editorial Board seems unaware of this work. It is a fair question, and there are qualified analysts on both sides. One of the best is Canadian economist Peter Victor. I admire Victor’s books and articles and have been influenced by them. So perhaps it is predictable that I agree with him on green growth’s prospects.

 

Victor’s latest book is last year’s Escape from Overshoot. In analyzing the pros and cons of the green growth proposal, Victor concludes that “the prospects for long term green growth are discouraging and they become more so the faster the economy grows.”  Victor sees potential benefit from green growth policies in the short term, but concludes: “More and more goods and services cannot be produced out of less and less forever. Green growth, which depends on the endless dematerialization of GDP, does not offer a plausible, even possible, long-term solution.”

 

Who does GDP growth benefit? A growing economy can be good for the bottom line of businesses, large and small. Government revenues go up when the economy grows: the taxman does not care if the activity is healthy or harmful. There are countries in the developing world where strong GDP growth could make a big positive difference. And we cannot forget the national security complex. For security hawks the global projection of a strong America is aided by robust GDP growth. We shouldn’t just try to wish all these complex matters away, but we can find ways to address them, including by looking around the world for ideas.

 

Our society tends to see growth as an unalloyed good, but an expanding body of evidence is now telling us to think again. The never-ending drive to grow the overall US economy has produced a ruthless international search for energy and other resources, brought us to the cusp of environmental ruin, led us away from badly needed policies and social growth, and rests on a manufactured consumerism that does not meet the deepest human needs. It’s time for something better. To me, that something better is post-growth, where society focuses major policy interventions on growing the activities that benefit people, place, and planet and on shrinking those things that do the opposite and, all the while, not pausing to worry about GDP.

For more on the author, see www.gusspeth.org.

The Essays from the Edge are being posted at https://www.democracycollaborative.org/blogs.

Cry, the Beloved World

(Essay #2)

Here is a topic miles away from the 2024 elections, though it should not be. Its political salience is just about zero, but it concerns the future of life on Earth. I could be referring to the recent surge in spending on nuclear weapons, but the devastation I will write about is slower yet no less problematic.

 

If you are of a certain age, you may remember the children’s book The Wump World.  It first appeared in 1970, the year of the first Earth Day. Its message was clear. The bountiful, bucolic world of the Wumps, with its lovely bumbershoot trees and plentiful grasses for grazing, was denuded and impoverished by the Pollutians, who had colonized the Wump’s planet because they had destroyed their own. The Wumps hid underground for a long time, and eventually the Pollutians left, blasting off in search of another planet.  Slowly, the Wumps came up, looked around and seeing the biotic impoverishment “wondered if there was anything left for them.”

 

Bill Peet, creator of the Wumps, leaves them with a bit of hope. Eventually, they found a small meadow of grass not scarified by the Pollutians’ ferocious, belching machines. But in the last sentence of his fable, Peet notes that “the Wump World would never be quite the same.”

 

Now, a half century later, we see that Peet’s message is still entirely too relevant. Major studies of Earth’s biological diversity by top scientific groups keep appearing, and despite decades of environmental action and many international agreements to protect species and ecosystems, these reports offer grim findings and forecasts.

 

The authoritative NatureServe group reports that species are going extinct today faster than any time in human history. The immediate causes include habitat loss and deterioration, dams and waterbody alteration, poaching, and climate change. They calculate that an alarming 34 percent of plant species and 40 percent of animal species in the United States are at risk of extinction and that 41 percent of US ecosystems are at risk of range-wide collapse. https://www.natureserve.org/bif.

 

It is not just here in the US, of course. Taking a global perspective, European scientists recently found “a widespread global erosion of species, with 48 percent undergoing declines.”  Their findings, they note, are “a further signal indicating that global biodiversity is entering a mass extinction, with ecosystem heterogeneity and functioning, biodiversity persistence, and human well-being under increasing threat.” 

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37189305.

 

The Living Planet Report 2022 is a comprehensive study of trends in global biodiversity and the health of the planet. This flagship World Wildlife Fund publication reports an average decline of 69% in species populations since 1970. https://livingplanet.panda.org/en-US.

 

Half the world’s tropical and temperate forests are gone. Half the world’s wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. Half of the large predator fish are gone as well as more than half the elephants. The list goes on.

Such tragic, tearful losses are being worsened by increasing global warming, ocean acidification, and other impacts of fossil fuel use. Climate change will speed and spread biological impoverishment while impeding the potential recovery of diminished ecosystems.

 

A phenomenally large and sophisticated enterprise has been working hard for many decades to save the Earth’s biological wealth, now spearheaded by impressive groups like the World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy and by feisty newcomers like the Center for Biological Diversity. In this cause, awe-inspiring films, beautiful books, and profound personal reflections have reached and often moved perhaps billions of people. Yet, despite decades of warnings and these tremendous efforts, the human enterprise plows recklessly ahead, doing to Earth what the Pollutians did to the Wump’s world.

 

This tragedy points to two overall conclusions. One is that the human enterprise on the planet has thus far been devastating for other life forms and for their habitats. Second is the plausible prediction, if history be our guide, that this

devastation will continue for a considerable amount of time, leading to a planetary condition of widespread biotic impoverishment. I do not want to exaggerate, but I believe we are on the cusp of a ruined planet.

 

It is just as if species had no rights and we had no duty to honor them!  The great cultural historian Thomas Berry pointed out that humans had grasped the concept of rights—and then given them all to themselves. He saw our misguided values and flawed consciousness as the root of ecological devastation and called for a profound reorientation. 

Berry sought to bring humans and nature together in a new “communion of subjects.” “The deepest cause of the present devastation,” he wrote in The Great Work, “is found in a mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being and the bestowal of all rights on the humans. … We see ourselves as a transcendent mode of being. We don’t really belong here. But if we are here by some strange destiny then we are the source of all rights and all values. All other earthly beings are instruments to be used or resources to be exploited for human benefit.” Here is some good news: there’s now a vibrant movement working to secure the rights of nature.

 

I would like to flip the normal chain of being which puts humans at the top and pose a question. Can you imagine Earth without people, not today’s Earth but a pristine Earth that evolved to the present without us? If you can contemplate such a world with satisfaction and pleasure—a world with forests of majestic old-growth trees, with oceans brimming over with fish, with clear skies literally darkened by passing flocks of birds, thriving with abundant diversity of life and landscape but without people—then you not only have a keen ecological consciousness but, more to my point, you are ready for a vital assignment.

 

Imagine further that you live on a different planet from this pristine Earth, and now you are the captain of the spaceship Voyage of Discovery. Your home world has become depleted, polluted, and overheated, and your people, billions of them, must find a new planet. You are the leader of the expedition to find such a place.

 

As the Voyage of Discovery enters the Solar System, its sensors immediately home in on the pristine Earth with all its biological and material wealth—wild, whole, and beautiful. As you settle into an orbit around Earth, you and your crew begin to

closely study Earth. You first become intrigued but then amazed and awe-struck by what you see, even fascinated by frogs.

 

You and your crew discuss how to settle Earth in a way that allows all of you to enjoy a decent standard of living while having the smallest possible impact on Earth’s environment. As the discussion warms up, a woman from the science team quiets the group with her intervention: “Whatever the odds of achieving a truly sustainable development on Earth, they are improved if the people and nations we would bring here are well-informed about science and policy choices, if they share deeply the values of social justice and environmental protection and care about the future as well as themselves, if they have a tradition of working together cooperatively to forge common goals and solve mutual problems, if they are democracies not dictatorships, and if they love peace.  Do the nations of our world meet these tests?” She lets the question hang there.

 

After her talk, there are some moments of reflection and discussion, but soon, at the urging of the captain, a decision is taken: leave Earth alone—save it and all its amazing beauty and diversity and let it evolve on its own uninterrupted path. There are smiles and quiet applause as Voyage of Discovery speeds away.

 

I want to end with some questions for us all.

 

We can’t fly away like the Voyage, leaving Earth to recover before we finish off the rest, so what is to be done in its stead? How can we recognize and respect the right of all of Earth’s life to flourish and accord intrinsic value to that life and life’s systems, nature for her own sake?

 

What are we prepared to sacrifice to save others, in this case the life that evolved here with us?  What are we prepared to do without: our aggrandizement or the wild things to whom we are close kin?

 

How do we try to compensate for our destruction of so much of Earth’s life? By curbing ourselves?  By deep societal change?  By bending heaven and Earth to protect what is left, before it is too late? 

For more on the author, see www.gusspeth.org.

The Essays from the Edge are being posted at https://www.democracycollaborative.org/blogs.