For two generations, the nascent environmental movement railed against this process. Like many, I was weaned on that scary sensibility. Population was a ticking bomb. Spring threatened to be silent. I still admire those who led the call for cleaning up the mess people had created in the rise and spread of industrialized, consumptive living.
But lately I’ve come to see those recent dirty decades less as malfeasance (mind you, there have been plenty of dubious actors) and more as an inevitable phase, a transition as natural — and volatile — as puberty.
The real question is, what comes next? As its moment on Earth has arrived, H. sapiens, one of nature’s great experiments, has necessarily had to have a selfish, muscle-flexing, exuberant adolescence. It is only natural for a young person to break things, burn things, kill things, to be mean and even nasty sometimes, if only to learn how that attitude can bite back. In a youth’s life, mistakes are not only inevitable; they are vital. (Source)
My concerns are broader than Revkin's, but like him, I'm inclined to see the destructive phase we've been going through as a phase in a larger developental or evolutionary process. Ours is the optimistic view, obviously, and it depends on humans effecting a moral evolutionary punctuation. That seems hard to imagine, and the purpose of my post earlier today was to sketch out how it might happen. Revkin's metaphor of "growing up" supplements mine about "waking up". It doesn't take everybody, just enough to create a tipping point.
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