Chris Hedges: Requiem for Our Species consortiumnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from consortiumnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Myth of Human Progress
Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth intellectually and emotionally and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.