It will be a hard sell, and we do not have forever. The World Resources Institute, also no hotbed of radical environmental pessimism, published a book titled The Crucial Decade . They gave us 50 years, and Harvard University published their call to arms. I do not think so, and this despite the fact that some greens have been expecting the end for a long, long time. Fear informs everything that greens say and do.
Greens know they are right and can be almost crushed by that knowledge.
They long for movement and resolution, and this, it seems, is a weakness. But it cannot be ignored. It is a matter not of opinion but of incessant and terrible fact that we are living in a time of slow biophysical cataclysm. Today's species extinction rates, hundreds or perhaps thousands of times greater than those typical of the last six hundred million years, demonstrate this well enough. Overwhelmed with our daily lives, we find global ecological decline a prospect difficult to take seriously.