Thinking of One's Legacy Produces an Environmentalist→

Tom Jacobs, writing for the Pacific Standard:

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“Most Americans believe that climate change is occurring. But as a recent Pew survey confirms, we don’t view it as a high-priority problem. After all, we reason, its most severe impacts won’t be felt for decades. So why change our behavior now?

New research points to a simple way to shift this maddening mindset. A team led by Columbia University psychologist Lisa Zaval finds people take the issue of environmental sustainability much more seriously if they have been thinking about their legacy.”

In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more thought of the future lights our way.”

What is the Single Greatest Virtue of Our Species?→

Brian Doyle, essay on 'What does the Earth Ask of Us?' for the Center for Humans & Nature:

“We thought it was a vast farm, from which we could draw fish and deer and corn and petroleum and silver and coal, and the farm had no end, we invented a god to give it to us as a garden of endless delights, but it does have an end, it is not infinite, the soil will disappear in sixty years and the fresh water go foul, cities will drown and toddlers die by the millions from diseases that have been waiting ravenously to return and scythe us down like we sliced down the vast seething lungs of the forests....

Do other species have standing in the courts of the human beings? Can osprey testify about their near-death experience, when they were poisoned en masse, and parents were forced to watch as their babies hatched too soon, inside their translucent useless eggshells, and died sobbing for breath, their bones unknit, unable even to mew, unable to see even a shard of the light hatched in the furnaces of the stars? What about trees? ”

Powerful and thoughtful prose.