"If I have a literary reputation, it's for a kind of dark realism. When I was still in my way—20s back in the 1980s—I published what is sometimes called the first book on the climate crisis. It bore the cheerful title The End of Nature; in the decades since, with 20 books and countless essays and articles published, I have chronicled those early warnings as they came true. This moment would seem to be—indeed it is—the summation and the vindication of all that angst.
And yet, right now, really for the first time, I can see a path forward. A path lit by the sun. And it's a path not just out of the climate crisis—it's a path that opens into a very new world. As I type, I've got this book's titular song, George Harrison's gentle and optimistic anthem, pouring through the headphones, blotting out the sound of the rain on the roof. I think that even as we teeter on the brink of renewed fascism, we're also potentially on the edge of one of those rare and enormous transformations in human history—something akin to the moment a few hundred years ago when we learned to burn coal and gas and oil, triggering the Industrial Revolution and hence modernity. But now, quite suddenly, we're learning not to burn those fossil fuels, and to rely instead on the large ball of flaming gas that hangs 93 million miles distant in the sky. We're on the verge of realizing that the sun, which already provides us light and warmth and photosynthesis, is also willing to provide us the power we need to run our lives. We are on the verge of turning to the heavens for energy instead of to hell."
— Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben
No comments:
Post a Comment