Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe

Preface

If humans choose to work to minimize the existential threats of our time, perhaps the most improbable aspect of remedy is that we will accept modalities based on collaboration and creative adaptation, rather than perpetual combat and domination.[1] It is a stark fact that present and future economies are predicated on a finite energy resource: carbon-based fuels.[2] Consensual science on climate change presents another fact: we may only have a few years to make adjustments in the collective carbon load before we are faced with irreversible consequences. As Christian Parenti in Tropic of Chaos perceptively and correctly points out:

“[E]ven if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped immediately—that is, if the world economy collapsed today, and not a single light bulb was switched on nor a single gasoline-powered motor started ever again—there is already enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to cause significant warming and disruptive climate change, and with that considerably more poverty, violence, social dislocation, forced migration, and political upheaval. Thus we must find humane and just means of adaptation, or we face barbaric prospects.”[3]

Seen in this light, to live collaboratively and creatively is less a radical proposal than a pragmatic one, if we, future generations, and the biosphere are to survive nuclear war and environmental catastrophe.