Ecology.

• Author: Botton, Alain de

The environmental dangers that now face mankind put me reflexive non-scientist in an awkward situation. He must acknowledge that he can have precisely nothing interesting to say on the two most important questions in the air, namely, "What is going to happen to us?" and "What should we do?" It is not from a philosopher that you stand to be enlightened.

Which is not to invalidate the attempt to contemplate, rather than simply find a way out of, our ecological dilemmas. It remains valid to try to fathom what the idea of planetary abuse has done to our minds. We may ask what the awareness of the crisis has done to our inner landscape, how it has altered the human psyche.

One should begin by observing that there is nothing new for mankind about confronting the possibility of its own destruction. The feeling that the present order--the neat fields, the ordered laundry cupboards, the full granaries -might soon disappear, would have been intensely familiar to any inhabitant of medieval Europe. One need only study the carvings on the sides of the cathedrals to see that our imaginations have for centuries been haunted by visions of Armageddon.

However, we have grown used to conceiving of our present environmental situation as unparalleled, perhaps because we have learnt of it through the media and because for the daily paper, everything must, from an a priori position, be novel. There never was a Lisbon earthquake or a sack of Rome. No one has ever murdered their children or wasted their fortune. This isn't to deny some intensely novel features behind our anxieties, just to insist that we must carefully separate out the familiar, longstanding morbidity of homo sapiens from the particular features of the current predicament.

One might do worse than to date our present ecological awareness to the moment when the two bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These weapons showed us not only that mankind was perishable (an old thought), but that it was perishable through human action (rather than because of diseased rats); in other words, that we have acquired the power to commit species-suicide. We have always known ourselves to be short-sighted and murderous. We have only in the past few generations learnt that we are also very powerful. We have been blessed with enough intelligence to alter our fates in a way no other animal can, while being denied enough wisdom to keep our baser sides under control.

Yet despite similarities, environmental...