Tag: climate change

It’s ironic that this whole Impossible Question — whether to have children in this age of climate change — springs from the same mentality underpinning the forces tearing the world apart, the idea that humans are in charge.

Cows do not kill people; people kill people. Especially people who claim cows are the problem. Cows are key players in solving the problems created by industrial agriculture.

Katharine Hayhoe is a professor at Texas Tech and the Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy. Her most recent book is Saving Us: A Climate...

At a time when ideologies and slogans often pull us away from the difficult task of finding realistic solutions and building a world together, the approach of these authors reveals the necessity of digging deep to confront the facts as they are and recognizing the complexity of challenging issues.

In the balance, Hayhoe’s book makes a positive contribution to the climate conversation. The book encourages dialogue rather than hectoring. In that sense, though the targeted topic is climate change, Hayhoe’s advice is good for any sort of persuasive argument.

Valetudinarianism connects arguments about the pandemic and the climate, with, on the one side, a distrust of experts and politicians, and, on the other, the belief that science (however defined) is paramount and must dictate, not simply advise, policy.

One answer from Kingsnorth’s fiction lies in limits. No human, nor all of us put together, is sovereign over the fate of the world, despite the unprecedented power we enjoy over life and death within it.

What would be helpful is a book that acknowledge both sets of trends and moves beyond name-calling to begin the hard work of engaging in the tensions and trade-offs between them. Beneficial too would be a clear-eyed encounter with the fact that measures of human happiness and fulfillment have not skyrocketed along with our greater health and wealth. People need more than just more stuff.

What Sanders offers might be called the imagination of hope—a means of acting to stem disaster.