Reconstructing our desires.

• Position: Essay

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First, decide: what are we saving, exactly? The world as most people knew it is gone, and it s not coming back. In my own time I've seen worlds end: the racially segregated school, the farmstead that relied on DDT. The writing life that moved at the pace of the postal service. Now I watch other endings unfold: temperatures nudging upward, coral reefs whiting out, forests rising in flames, glacier-fed rivers dying in their beds. Living systems failing.

Worlds end. We invent things, we become enamored, they grow cold in our hands, we move on, forever driven by the same human craving to accomplish single-handedly the work of twenty people or a thousand. It's the power lever we can't resist, the route to accumulation. Slavery was an enduring option, in which one person with the coerced labor of many could build a pyramid. Or grow cotton. When the morality of that system fell into doubt, along came a new, ethically neutral choice for power enhancement: burning concentrated carbon. Astride a combustion engine, one person could travel miles in a day and build pyramids sky-high, romancing the fossil fuel.

And darned if we aren't caught out again. Burning the world has consequences. Furiously we deny it, but slowly the truth dawns, every fuel-powered action carries its quota of damage. Driving a car, buying food, and pushing the "on" button are not morally neutral enterprises. They inflict pain by increments on the seas and forests, the people in floodplains and drought-stricken farmlands, and the hopes of my daughter who wants to be a biologist someday. Losses unravel before me, and I ache. How do I quantify my small contribution to this catastrophe? Looking back, I would say the people who owned just a few slaves were not ethically different from those who owned hundreds.

T he honorable choice I see is to power-down: stop taking airplane jaunts, repair old things, get out the clothespins, grow food, walk. And face the truth, that I am a party to something so enormously destructive I can hardly know its edges. The conquering of any addiction begins with these words: I am the guilty party.

My country has broken all records for demonstrating the widest gap between what a human can get by on and what a human can waste. One in ten families needs food stamps. Many must choose between heating the house or renting it. And collectively, we spend more money on Halloween candy than on sustainable energy research. We have equated...