we’re facing an environmental cataclysm that is endangering all life on this planet, yet none of us think we’re participating in something horrific.
We ask, “How could something really horrific be accepted by everyone around me? Surely my career and my way of life can’t be that bad if everyone else is doing it too. If it were, somebody would have stopped it already. Right?”
We are having trouble recognizing this horror because there are virtually no bad guys in the game. There are a few, probably, at Monsanto and in oil and gas companies, and a few in public office. But even they are not sitting around tables in the evenings smoking cigars and plotting the extinction of the polar bear. Most of them don’t have malicious intent. They’re just following the prevailing logic and ethic of our culture—the logic and ethic of commerce. They’re just being smart businesspeople,...
