But of course further degradation isn’t inescapable; it is optional. Each new baby arrives in a brand-new world, contemplating a whole horizon of possibilities. The perspective is not naive. We live in that world with them—helping make it for them, and with them, and for ourselves. The next decades are not yet determined. A new timer begins with every birth, measuring how much more damage will be done to the planet and the life this child will live on it. The horizons are just as open to us, however foreclosed and foreordained they may seem. But we close them off when we say anything about the
...more
