The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [73]
Mindfulness of nature, therefore, is not a tree hugger’s plea but a practical imperative for twenty-first-century survival. Our peril is unprecedented, and human knowledge, values, and social institutions are far behind the curve. The global economy has suddenly become so large—$70 trillion a year and doubling in size roughly every twenty years—that the earth’s air, water, land, and climate are all under threat. Our global response to date has been so obtuse, so absurd, so shortsighted that it almost seems that humanity has a death wish. This ignorance and shortsightedness can lead us to disaster. Of course, more than a death wish has been at play; the greed of powerful vested interests has been far more consequential than public confusion and shortsightedness.
The American performance in the face of ecological dangers is especially sobering. Americans impose the highest per capita impact on the planet yet show the least regard for their actions. The UN climate change treaty was signed and ratified by the United States in 1992, but the U.S. Senate has refused to take even one small step since then in limiting America’s impact on climate. Many American senators are notoriously and aggressively ignorant or dismissive about the science, such as Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, who described human-induced climate change as the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”11 Politicians may be knowledgeable but still deeply cynical, playing for campaign contributions rather than the well-being of their grandchildren. They are ready to close their eyes to the looming disaster rather than earn their pay by explaining the tough realities and difficult policy choices to their constituents and to the Big Oil and Coal interests that fund their campaigns.
Unfortunately, the ecological threats continue to multiply, yet America is passive and resistant to action. Market forces, alas, will never solve these threats but only exacerbate them, until society, acting collectively at last, mindfully commits to creating a protective cordon around the threatened planet.
Responsibility Toward the Future
We can’t address any of these problems if we can’t think systematically about the future. And the future extends beyond the next election. The time horizon of public deliberation in America has shrunk to an unimaginably brief scale. When we need to build infrastructure, we aim for “shovel-ready” projects. Yet infrastructure worth building cannot be shovel-ready, a fact that Obama finally acknowledged in late 2010, after championing such projects in the 2009 stimulus package. Similarly, when we go to war, we aim for a short, brief “surge” to do the job. Repeatedly, and predictably, we fall woefully short of our objectives by choosing such short-term measures.
Mindfulness of the future therefore requires a special act of will: to take moral and practical ownership of the long-term consequences of our actions and to trace those consequences as carefully as possible into the far future. One great philosopher, Hans Jonas, has argued that we need a whole new ethic for the future, since never before has a human generation held in its hands the prosperity or ruin of the generations to come.12 We profess our commitment to “sustainability,” that is, to ensuring that the future will be able to meet its needs with the knowledge, capital, and environment that we bequeath it. Yet we really don’t know what sustainability entails as we continue to plunder the planet for resources and simply hope for the best.
Taking moral responsibility for the future, accepting the reality that our actions today will