One assessment is the newly-released International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2018 interim report, which comes hard on the heels of the “Hothouse Earth” paper. And if we have borrowed from those yet to come, our debts are correspondingly climbing higher and higher. Its urgency reflected the ethereal burden of a debt to those without the capacity to demand payment. To the extent that few will openly shrug at ecology-even the nuclear clerks justify their fission-fetish by claiming nuclear power is cleaner than the alternatives-this, too, is the fruit of the environmental movement. To the extent our water and air are relatively clean, this is the work of the Green movement. Still, the ecological movement did an enormous amount of good. It became close to a cliché, although without managing to become common wisdom. In the environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s, some slight mutation of this quotation was common currency. As Berry put it, there have always been those “exceptional people,” that man, or woman “who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children.” 1 Because people are not subject to statistical laws of distribution, exceptions can become the rule when exceptional ideas seize enough people.
In contrast to earlier ways of life, our social relations, which are our productive relations, do not force us to reckon with the consequences of what we consume in the course of making our lives, including making the people who come after we do. The agrarianist Wendell Berry wrote once that modernity had bred a dangerous and close-to-fatal ignorance about ecology.
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