The reason people find ourselves verging toward planetary extinction is fairly simple: for quite some time, it’s been profitable for humans to behave this way. But, the actual conspiracy is that people are made to feel as though humanity’s fate were purely a matter of personal choice. This isn’t to say that people possess no power at all. But the scale of the problem is difficult to comprehend, and discussions leave many people feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed, reduced to myopic debates about whether people are too scared or not scared enough. Perhaps, as Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy argue, the inability to imagine another path forward reflects a limited vocabulary. Their modest contribution is the recently published “An Ecotopian Lexicon,” a collection of essays that seeks to expand the language people use to describe the present-day crisis and its possibilities.
By Hua Hsu. The New Yorker. February 21, 2020.
