Orion Magazine has posted the transcript of a highly interesting conversation between Tim DeChristopher and Terry Tempest Williams:
[T]here’s no hope in avoiding collapse. If you look at the worst-case consequences of climate change, those pretty much mean the collapse of our industrial civilization. But that doesn’t mean the end of everything. It means that we’re going to be living through the most rapid and intense period of change that humanity has ever faced. And that’s certainly not hopeless. It means we’re going to have to build another world in the ashes of this one. And it could very easily be a better world. I have a lot of hope in my generation’s ability to build a better world in the ashes of this one. And I have very little doubt that we’ll have to. The nice thing about that is that this culture hasn’t led to happiness anyway, it hasn’t satisfied our human needs. So there’s a lot of room for improvement.
We are in the process of committing the world to a terrifying amount of climate change. It seems plausible that as it gets worse, people will eventually become less willing to work together to deal with it. Hopefully the next few years will see the emergence of a movement strong enough to close off the worst possibilities of extreme warming, and capable of adapting to keep humanity on a comparatively sane and cooperative path in the future.
