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It's time to rally around an embattled concept: free will.
Having aligned myself against a battalion of irresistible forces over the years, I've become a student of inevitability. How do environmentally destructive choices become inevitable? Near as I can tell, it starts when the people who will benefit from these choices simply begin to assert their inevitability. People seem especially receptive to inevitability right now. We're comforted by the notion that amid all the uncertainty and confusion, the restructuring and rightsizing and layoffs and insecurity-some larger forces are at work toward a predetermined outcome. We're sort of relieved to hear that something's inevitable, even if it's not necessarily something we like. It clarifies things. It's more pragmatic to be resigned to the inevitable than to chart a new course through the chaos. So the myth of inevitability spreads and the prophecy fulfills itself. If the proponents of a particular course can get a critical mass of folks to believe that it's a foregone conclusion, pretty soon it will be.
Those who assert that conservation, renewables and environmental protection are at their inevitable end are using the only strategy available to them. They propound the myth of inevitability because they know that few of us would actually choose more waste, dependence on fossil fuels, and environmental degradation. Having no chance of convincing people that these outcomes are desirable, perhaps, they reason, we can be persuaded that we have no choice in the matter.
But inevitably we do have choices to make. Failing to make them consciously isn't failing to make them at all: It's just falling for the inevitability trap. It's just giving ourselves an excuse for allowing the wrong choices to be made, and a feeble excuse at that. Among all the reasons for making the wrong choice, I think the least satisfying, the least noble, the hardest one to forgive ourselves for is: "It wasn't up to me."
Well, it is up to somebody. Who's it gonna be?
From The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear edited by Paul Loeb (Basic Books, www.theimpossible.org), named the #3 political book of Fall 2004 by the History Channel and American Book Association.
KC Golden is policy director of Climate Solutions (www.climatesolutions.org), which promotes clean and efficient energy sources. He's former director of energy policy for the State of Washington.
Having aligned myself against a battalion of irresistible forces over the years, I've become a student of inevitability. How do environmentally destructive choices become inevitable? Near as I can tell, it starts when the people who will benefit from these choices simply begin to assert their inevitability. People seem especially receptive to inevitability right now. We're comforted by the notion that amid all the uncertainty and confusion, the restructuring and rightsizing and layoffs and insecurity-some larger forces are at work toward a predetermined outcome. We're sort of relieved to hear that something's inevitable, even if it's not necessarily something we like. It clarifies things. It's more pragmatic to be resigned to the inevitable than to chart a new course through the chaos. So the myth of inevitability spreads and the prophecy fulfills itself. If the proponents of a particular course can get a critical mass of folks to believe that it's a foregone conclusion, pretty soon it will be.
Those who assert that conservation, renewables and environmental protection are at their inevitable end are using the only strategy available to them. They propound the myth of inevitability because they know that few of us would actually choose more waste, dependence on fossil fuels, and environmental degradation. Having no chance of convincing people that these outcomes are desirable, perhaps, they reason, we can be persuaded that we have no choice in the matter.
But inevitably we do have choices to make. Failing to make them consciously isn't failing to make them at all: It's just falling for the inevitability trap. It's just giving ourselves an excuse for allowing the wrong choices to be made, and a feeble excuse at that. Among all the reasons for making the wrong choice, I think the least satisfying, the least noble, the hardest one to forgive ourselves for is: "It wasn't up to me."
Well, it is up to somebody. Who's it gonna be?
From The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear edited by Paul Loeb (Basic Books, www.theimpossible.org), named the #3 political book of Fall 2004 by the History Channel and American Book Association.
KC Golden is policy director of Climate Solutions (www.climatesolutions.org), which promotes clean and efficient energy sources. He's former director of energy policy for the State of Washington.