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 rise is measurably accelerating, and the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events are 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 in favor of the latter during the European Enlightenment. I grew up in that belief. I never expected to be fighting in my old age for preservation of even our most basic Enlightenment tenets; but I think that we are now in that battle. I will be offering here my thoughts on how we got into it, how it has been abetting both our environmental self-sabotage and political regression, and on how we might still be able to turn its tide.