The question that haunts me, and has since I wrote The End of Nature, is whether we’ve—the
thing that we’re doing now is so large that it fundamentally alters our prospects as a
civilization.
Climate change is the best example of that.
And climate change, by now, has already reached the point where, as I say in the first section,
it changes the size of the board on which we’re playing this game.
Forever, since humans came out of Africa, we’ve been expanding the board on which
we play the game, you know, finding new places, spreading out.
Now things are contracting.
Now people are beginning to worry very much about the cities that they live that are near
the coasts.
Now we’re seeing—perhaps you saw the story in yesterday’s Times about how climate change
has become the main driver for those immigrants having to leave their homes in Guatemala,
Honduras, El Salvador, not because they want to, because there’s such a deep drought
that they can’t grow anything there anymore.
Those are the opening salvos in what’s going to be a century of shrinkage.
I mean, think about what we saw in California last fall.
I mean, literally, in an hour, a city called Paradise turned literally into hell.
You know, everybody who watched it could imagine dying in a car trapped in a road as they tried
to get out of a forest fire.
If California, the place we’ve always identified with a kind of golden ease, you know, is now
in a paranoid sense of fear for much of the year as they look over their shoulder for
the next fire, well, that’s another sense in which this board has begun to shrink.
The second part of the book is more political.
I tried to answer, for my own purposes, the question of why we did so little for so long.
And I think it has everything to do with the ascendant political ideology of this period,
this sense that laissez-faire capitalism, that markets alone would solve problems, that
happened to be the dominant political philosophy in the most important country in the world
at precisely the most important moment.
It’s no accident that people like the Koch brothers, our biggest political players, are
also oil and gas barons.
I mean, they understood climate change as a threat both to their business and to their
ideological worldview, because, of course, if we’re going to solve it, we’re going
to have to take joint action, as societies, to do so.
The third part of the book takes a turn into Silicon Valley and asks the question, if,
having ended nature, we’re also on the verge of ending human nature.
The same libertarian ideology, the same Ayn Rand fan club, that exists in places like
the Koch brothers’ network, exists, too, at the top of the heap in Silicon Valley,
where everybody pays homage to the idea that they should be left alone by the government—left
alone in this case to do things like genetically engineer children, so that we had, in October,
the first two designer babies born on this planet, in China, but, as we learned in yesterday’s
newspaper, with help from professors at places like Stanford.
That future should frighten us in all kinds of ways