Note: This is a sidebar to a profile of the founder of High Country News and his increasingly pessimistic view of the future, headlined, “A Hell of an Anniversary.”
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“… A simple look at the upward path of global greenhouse-gas emissions (indicates) we will continue to squeeze the trigger on the gun we have put to our own head …”
— Eugene Linden, in The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of
Civilizations, Simon & Schuster, 2006
***
“… The ship is already starting to spin out of control. We may soon lose all chance of grabbing the wheel. Humanity faces a genuinely new situation.
It is not an environmental crisis in the accepted sense. It is a crisis for the entire life-support system for our civilization and our species.”
— Fred Pearce, in The Last Generation: How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change, Eden Projects Books, 2007
***
“… At this point it’s almost certainly too late to manage a transition to sustainability on a global or national scale, even if the political will to attempt it existed — which it clearly does not. … Our civilization is in the early stages of the same curve of decline and fall as so many others have followed before it. … What likely lies in wait for us is a long, uneven decline into a new Dark Age from which, centuries from now, the civilizations of the future will gradually emerge.”
—John Michael Greer, in The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, New Society Publishers, 2008
***
“… We are strong and adaptable animals and can certainly make a new life on the hotter Earth, but there will only be a fraction of inhabitable land left … Soon we face the appalling question of whom can we let aboard the lifeboats? And whom must we reject? … There will be great clamor from climate refugees seeking a safe haven in those few parts where the climate is tolerable and food is available. … We will need a new set of rules for (limiting the population in) climate oases.”
—James Lovelock, in The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, Basic Books, 2009
***
“… Imagine we live on a planet. Not our cozy, taken-for-granted planet, but a planet, a real one, with melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat. An inhospitable place. … It needs a new name. Eaarth.”
—Bill McKibben’s opening paragraph in Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Times Books/Henry Holt, April, 2010
–RAY RING
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Doomster chorus.
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