http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/despairing-about-climate-crisis/

Certainly, for me, one of the reasons to get out of bed is that we really haven’t tried everything. Having done miserably at communication, having done miserably at policy, having done miserably at market responses to climate change gives us a ton of hope, because we could do so much better.

The other thing is we’re short-sighted human beings on many counts, and yet our species has managed to build cathedrals that took 300 years apiece. So it’s not like we can’t. The future isn’t written yet. It is still open in terms of how it’s going to be shaped.

Still, what we have to realize — and what’s dawning on many people now — is that we have put a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere that won’t just come out tomorrow. That’s why we have to make space for grief, fear, and all the rest of it in public spaces and in our private lives.

We’re dealing with a global system that’s highly interconnected. We have set so many things in motion that if you tried to control it right now, you couldn’t. We have sailed a ship, and the question is, are we going to keep blowing wind into its sails and sending it off into even more troubled waters, or are we going to do what we can to smooth out the waters, and make sure the opening to the harbor is wide enough for everyone?

There is a ton of space left in terms of what we can do. We can’t just do anything we want, because of the things we have already set in motion, but we can stop making it worse, and there are so many options to deal with the challenges and to make life much less miserable for the vast majority of the world’s people.

So I think it’s a matter of priorities and values, and reckoning with what we have done. In the public sphere, it’s called political work. In the private sphere, there is deeply personal transformational work that needs to be done.