McEwan on climate change

Back in 2005, Ian McEwan described our situation with regards to climate change in this way:

How can we ever begin to restrain ourselves? We appear, at this distance, like a successful lichen, a ravaging bloom of algae, a mould enveloping a fruit. Can we agree among ourselves? We are a clever but quarrelsome species – in our public discourses we can sound like a rookery in full throat…

Despite that near ignorance, or perhaps because of it, reports from a range of scientific disciplines are telling us with certainty that we are making a mess of the earth, we are fouling our nest and we have to act decisively and against our immediate inclinations. For we tend to be superstitious, hierarchical and self-interested, just when the moment requires us to be rational, even-handed and altruistic. We are shaped by our history and biology to frame our plans within the short term, within the scale of a single lifetime; and in democracies, governments and electorates collude in an even tighter cycle of promise and gratification. Now we are asked to address the wellbeing of unborn individuals we will never meet and who, contrary to the usual terms of human interaction, will not be returning the favour.

This seems a rather good concise summary of the challenge, and why human beings are so poorly equipped to respond to it.

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