ABSTRACT

We live in troubled times. According to the United Nations, climate change is among the most serious and far-reaching threats to human life on earth. The UN Global Issues website states: “By the middle of the 20th century, it was becoming clear that … the process of ‘global warming’ was accelerating. Today, nearly all scientists agree that we must stop and reverse this process now—or face a devastating cascade of natural disasters that will change life on earth as we know it.” 1 Scientists have also sent out dire warnings. NASA climatologist James Hansen writes in Storms of My Grandchildren (2009) that we now have clear evidence that “the continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself—and the timetable is shorter than we thought.” 2 In his 2011 Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, the internationally renowned environmentalist Bill McKibben even claims that we should give our planet a new name (Eaarth), because the life-friendly habitat we used to call “earth” is already on its way to becoming an inhospitable place, “with melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat.” 3