We should celebrate the small successes

Finally, a public figure has had the courage to declare that the worst effects of climate change are not only incontrovertible but also inevitable.

Jonathan Franzen [Sept. 8, The New Yorker, “What If We Stopped Pretending”] argues that Americans and people around the world are unwilling or unable to make the sacrifices and adjustments necessary to stave off the temperature rise of two degrees Celsius which will result in the “radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought.”

Franzen makes a convincing argument that though many still hold on to hope that humanity will wake up to the dangers of climate change and make the changes necessary to avert a total meltdown, that very hope has become an unwitting means of rejecting or projecting into the future the radical changes necessary to even slow down the inevitable. He concludes his analysis with the claim that in order to authentically prepare ourselves for the inevitable apocalypse, we must stop pretending that the apocalypse is preventable. As he says, “it’s fine to struggle against the constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of what’s to come, but it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning.”

Franzen does not paint a rosy picture of what is ahead for all of us, but it does open up the possibility that despair is not the only response to accepting what is inevitable and true and reminds us that there are small successes to celebrate.

Jack Pasanen, Burlington