THE LAST BEST HOPE

Our activities are now altering our planet’s climate and extinguishing species at a faster rate than we can determine for any previous such change during the 65 million years since impact of our dinosaur killing meteorite. Our glaciers and ice caps are observably melting, mean sea level is measurably rising and at an accelerating rate, and the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events is increasing. We are also emerging from a global pandemic, but with the expectation that we will be into the next one within a few decades at best. And our strange response to all of this seems to have been resumption of the ancient battle between fear and desire grounded authoritarianism and reason and empathy grounded democracy which most of us thought had been settled during the European Enlightenment. I am writing here to offer my thoughts why it wasn’t settled, how its not having been settled has led to both our environmental self-sabotage and political regression, and how we might still be able to halt and reverse these.