My self-appointed mission: to think and feel my way into our darkening future, trace out the pathways before us, game out our options, and along the way — amidst my own splutterings of hope and despair — take good notes and draw a few maps that might be useful to all of us.

Any news I might bring has already been brought. Thousands of scientific papers. Millions of newspaper column inches. Anyone who cares to pay attention already knows that we’ve broken Nature, and the world we know will soon end. This park, for one, is done for. This city I love, home to almost nine million, and one of humankind’s most extraordinary

get was a slow accretion of awareness that was unlikely to achieve critical mass until our most vital time windows had closed. Then along came Covid. No, it wasn’t a climate event per se, but it was a global cataclysm that we all experienced together, viscerally, in our bodies and in our daily lives. Many of us lost loved ones. Millions died. (Over