Being implies obligation. Hans Jonas The most incomprehensible moral idiocy of our time is indifference to the fate of the planet. I say this humbly, because I have not really said it until just now: I am late to the truth. Not that I ever denied it, of course; deferring to science on matters about which only science has authority is a quintessential act of reason and even of love, if love includes the desire to protect and protract the life of who and what is loved. The problem with environmental concern has been precisely that its grounds are so obvious — it has become a part of the standard equipment of an enlightened individual, an ambient truth dulled by its own ambience. It has produced, since the nineteenth century, a beautiful literature, whose beauty seems almost a promise of its futility: to read Muir or Leopold or Carson is to be enchanted when one should be agitated. What does “nature writing” have to do with nature policy? In politics, certainly, the cause of the environment, when it is not outrightly rejected by liars and profiteers, occasions more lip service than any other cause. The apocalypse has become a platitude, as it often does. For many years the temporal distance of the doom blunted the fear of it; time, in a rare role for it, seemed like our friend. And so, like many people, I prevaricated, I cared, but not the most. The truth is never enough to set you free. Yet now, at least in my case, the fear must be dusted off, and the shock of environmental awareness must be refreshed. Time is a false friend. It helps that the weather is increasingly the breaking news above the fold. (Remember the fold?) Suddenly one must add to the expertise of the scientists the evidence of one’s senses. No, every scalding day of summer does not prove that the world is burning up, but it is invidious — it is unempirical — to pretend that nothing is happening, that it has not begun, that the question of climate change is still purely futural. Have we ever lived so meteorologically? Even in regions of the world where human evil seems unsurpassable, the cruelties of the environment are catching up quickly; but then those cruelties, too, are the consequences of human evil — or more precisely, of human action, even of laudable human action, which, if it continues unmodified into this early era of climate disaster, will indeed become a variety of human evil. About some things, the age of unanticipated consequences is over. We know what the planetary effects of some of our actions will be. What, really, is the other side of this question? Clearly nobody is for environmental holocaust. But there are political leaders and political parties that, in their anti-regulatory zealotry and their cultural hostility to ecological concerns, may as well be for it. It is indeed the case that scientists may sometimes be wrong; but the fallibility of science is one of its glories, because scientists are the first to acknowledge it, and it comes with a principled impatience for its own correction. The repudiation of science that is now one of the defining characteristics of the American right must not be allowed to hide behind the provisional and experimental nature of scientific research. Being wrong is not as egregious as being stupid. And environmentalists, for their part, must learn to accept that dogmatism is not more attractive when it serves the proper side. The sanctimony of the party of the earth is sometimes hard to take. The worst scenario is not the only scenario. There are many legitimate debates to be had within the community of alarm. Many years ago I became interested in a debate about environmental regulation between the advocates of the “precautionary principle” and the advocates of cost-benefit analysis. The latter contend that the best way to evaluate environmental damage is in economic terms, as if all of it is quantifiable; and that precipitous action against a particular risk often produces other risks, so that we will only aggravate the problem that we set out to solve; and that a policy of preemption, of general foreboding, would have an excessively inhibiting effect on innovation and growth. The former, the precautionists, who are arguing for extra dollops of prudence, prefer philosophical arguments and humane attitudes that come without the apparatus of social science; they insist that the stakes are too high to think in merely economic ways, which in any event are no guarantee of accuracy or success, and that erring in the direction of caution, which is to say, of economically contested policies, is morally and practically justified. Precaution has been more popular in Europe than in America, as in this typical declaration of a United Nations Economic Conference for Europe in 1990: “In order to achieve sustainable development, policies must be based on the Precautionary Principle. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation.” It is hard for me to believe that if sensible precautionary measures, which is to say, regulations unpopular in some of the business community, had been adopted in this country (and some were) years ago, the iPhone and the app would not have been invented. Nor should greed be permitted to disguise itself as a high-minded anxiety about sustainable growth. In truth, our predicament is Pascalian, and it calls for a wager: if a strict regime of regulation makes a decisive difference in saving us, then we (and all life)
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