It's like the beginning of a kind of movie we've all seen: a countdown, potential devastation looming, a rallying-around of the team--is it enough? will it be in time?--and then, improbably but through some gutsy, brilliant, on-the-money move, calamity is averted--cue the the brass fanfare--and happy-with-relief faces gaze toward a glowing post-crisis future--except this is not cinema, there are no trick shots, no stuntmen or no sleight-of-hand edits, and the knock-out punch may fall short, get deflected, or arrive with no more punch than a cotton ball.
The scenes of catastrophe that spice our thriller films and titillate us into caring about the drama of final resolution may in fact actually come to pass here, to us, inexorable over the next decade. The smart fixes, the quick decisions, the steady hands that win the day on the screen may not work here. However much we want you 150 heads of state from 195 countries, you 25,000 delegates and 50,000 participants at COP21 to agree on effective steps to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees C, no more than 2 degrees C, you may fail, and we'll bequeath to our progeny a legacy of slo-mo disruption of all that we've thought was normal.
The inertial reluctance to act is so strong, the task so large, the distractions so many, the opponents so tenacious, the time so short, in short, the odds so long...and the clock is ticking.
And yet, whenever have so many representing almost all mankind gathered to seriously address global habitability, the very ability of our planet--the whole planet!--to support our species as it stands.
This feels like a cliff-hanger, a championship final game, a fingers-crossed wait for news from the operating room. I'm in a kind of agony of apprehension. All you there: I hope there are moments when you are in some way more than yourselves, when you live up to and transcend all that mankind has learned over the millenia, and do a work that, like the resonance of certain documents, grows in significance over the generations. Give us, onlookers and well-wishers, something we can be guided by, can live up to.
The scenes of catastrophe that spice our thriller films and titillate us into caring about the drama of final resolution may in fact actually come to pass here, to us, inexorable over the next decade. The smart fixes, the quick decisions, the steady hands that win the day on the screen may not work here. However much we want you 150 heads of state from 195 countries, you 25,000 delegates and 50,000 participants at COP21 to agree on effective steps to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees C, no more than 2 degrees C, you may fail, and we'll bequeath to our progeny a legacy of slo-mo disruption of all that we've thought was normal.
The inertial reluctance to act is so strong, the task so large, the distractions so many, the opponents so tenacious, the time so short, in short, the odds so long...and the clock is ticking.
And yet, whenever have so many representing almost all mankind gathered to seriously address global habitability, the very ability of our planet--the whole planet!--to support our species as it stands.
This feels like a cliff-hanger, a championship final game, a fingers-crossed wait for news from the operating room. I'm in a kind of agony of apprehension. All you there: I hope there are moments when you are in some way more than yourselves, when you live up to and transcend all that mankind has learned over the millenia, and do a work that, like the resonance of certain documents, grows in significance over the generations. Give us, onlookers and well-wishers, something we can be guided by, can live up to.
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