ABSTRACT
What are we supposed to do when faced with an ecological crisis that does not resemble any of the crises of war and economies, the scale of which is formidable, to be sure, but to which we are in a way habituated since it is of human, all too human, origin? What to do when told, day after day, and in increasingly strident ways, that our present civilization is doomed; that the Earth itself has been so tampered with that there is no way it will ever come back to any of the various steady states of the past? What do you do when reading, for instance, a book such as Clive Hamilton’s Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change – and that the species is not the dodo or the whale but us, that is, you and me? (Hamilton 2010) Or Harald Welzer’s Climate Wars: What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century, a book that is nicely divided into three parts: how to kill yesterday, how to kill today, and how to kill tomorrow! (Welzer 2012) In every chapter, to tally the dead, you have to add several orders of magnitude to your calculator!
