“Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life,”45 and sometimes the solution: we need a “Marshall Plan for the Earth.”

Not on preventing catastrophe, but simply surviving it; on keeping a tenuous thread of civilization going across the next many generations; on some of us getting through the horror and wreckage of it, to some other mode of living profoundly different from anything we know. This is the “hope beyond hope” that British writer and ecologist Paul Kingsn

Guy: Built into our culture is the notion — and it goes without question by most people — that we’re going to live a long time. That civilization will persist forever. That economic growth is just a given, and every generation will have more than the generation before. Which I guess shouldn’t be too surprising. Since nobody comes on the television

“It’s as if giving up on saving the world,” writes eco-visionary Charles Eisenstein, “opens us up to doing the things that will save the world.”8

. . . a steep winding-down of the size of the industrial economy. It strips away its burdens and complications, nurses the human ecology back to health, builds local competence and discovers a sense of place. . . . This is managed descent. . . . The shock is as gentle and as survivable as foresight can make

one is happy about this. No one thinks this is the right way to live. But we don’t know what to do. We don’t know how to feel. And so, a part of us falls silent. We play tricks on our soul. We slide into a strange double life, “caught,” says eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, (see page 187) “between a sense of impending apocalypse and the fear of acknowl

Macy: “If we are going to go out,” she says, let’s “do it with some nobility, generosity and beauty.”

What we can do, however, is change our own expectations and choose a different way to do our work: not on behalf of “saving the world” but for the people around us. The planet is weeping, yes, but ultimately, the planet will be fine. The question is: How will we be? Our bravery is to continue to trust in human goodness and be present for people as

Bill McKibben has put some very precise numbers on our remaining carbon budget. You’re saying we’re going to need to safeguard some portion of that budget for some of these critical transitional steps? Gopal: We need to be very smart about how we use our carbon budget. We should absolutely not be expending any fossil energy exploring for more fossi