Editor,

Clive Hamilton, in his “Requiem for a Species: Why we Resist the Truth About Climate Change,” describes the dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is now virtually certain.” The obliteration of our “false hopes” requires not only intellectual knowledge but emotional knowledge. Intellectual knowledge is more easily attained. Emotional knowledge, which requires us to accept that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery, and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire.

The crisis before us is the culmination of a 500-year global rampage of conquering, plundering, exploiting, and polluting the earth, as well as killing by Europeans and Euro-Americans of indigenous communities that stood, and in North Dakota currently stand, in their way. Ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of industrial capitalism.

The last days of any civilization, when populations are averting their eyes from the unpleasant realities before them, become carnivals of hedonism and folly. Today charlatans and hucksters hold forth on political platforms, and intellectuals are ridiculed. Force, and militarism, and hyper masculine ethic, are celebrated. And the mania for hope requires the silencing of any truth that is not childishly optimistic.

The road to oblivion becomes, in the end, a narcotic reverie.

MATT LINDER

Langley