Orion Magazine - January-February 2009

And yet, somehow, we don’t seem to be able to engage this monster adequately. While Aspen Skiing Company has developed a worldwide reputation as a green company, our energy use keeps increasing, despite herculean e=orts to reduce it. Not only are other businesses struggling in the same way, but also most of the nations that signed the Kyoto Treaty are missing their targets. Why? Because our society is entirely based on cheap energy. We can’t just retool it overnight. Solving climate change is going to be a bitch.

Given the extreme challenges we face in implementing solutions—whether trying to make mass transit work, >xing the problem of existing buildings, building enough renewable energy to power our operations, or driving federal action on climate policy— it’s worth asking the question: what will motivate us to actually pull this o= How will we become, and then remain, inspired for the long slog ahead? Because this battle will take not just political will and corporate action; it will require unyielding commitment and dedication on the part of humanity. We need to literally remake society.

We can intellectualize the need for action all we want, but in my experience, in the end our motivation usually comes down to a cliché: our kids and, for want of a better word, our dignity. The journalist Bill Moyers has said, “What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called ‘hocma’—the science of the heart . . . the capacity to see . . . to feel. . . and then to act. . . as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.”

Moyers, who is an ordained Baptist minister, taps into something positively religious about the possibilities in a grand movement to protect the Earth. Climate change o=ers us something immensely valuable and di;cult to >nd in the modern world: the opportunity to participate in a movement that, in its vastness of scope, can ful>ll the universal human need for a sense of meaning in our lives. A climate solution—a world running e;ciently on abundant clean energy—by necessity goes a long way toward solving many, if not most, other problems too: poverty, hunger, disease, food and water supply, equity, solid waste, and on and on.

Climate change doesn’t have to scare us. It can inspire us; it is a singular opportunity to remake society in the image of our greatest dreams.

WHAT ARE THOSE DREAMS? The concept of an ideal society has been a core element in human thought for all of recorded history. In 1516, Thomas More wrote about a kingdom called Utopia o= the coast of the recently discovered Americas; in doing so, he brought the concept of an ideal society out of the realm of religious faith and the afterlife and into the world of the living. For centuries, that utopian ideal had been called by di= erent names but had always existed in some other world: the Garden of Eden, Paradise, the Land of Cockaigne. More’s idea that such a place might exist here on Earth was radical, but it came from the same yearning for meaning and betterment that has always driven human beings to new heights. One of the great and hopeful concepts of human history, it carried itself into the present: from the settling and then founding of America and all its promise; to the vision behind Kennedy’s City on a Hill and Johnson’s Great Society; to Martin Luther King, who said that he might not get there with us, but he had seen the Promised Land.

The absence of that vision is despair.

Barry Lopez has written, “One of the oldest dreams of mankind is to >nd a dignity that might include all living things. And one of the greatest of human longings must be to bring such dignity to one’s own dreams, for each to >nd his or her own life exemplary in some way.” This longing is a fundamental aspect of human experience. In my work, I see it on a daily basis, in people like Walter Bennett, in the hundreds of college graduates looking for work in the >eld of sustainability, in people all over the world.