Also in this new edition of Hedgehog, another, shorter piece by me on how not to save the planet. Sample:
This marks for me my problem in reading [Jonathan] Schell and [Bill] McKibben: My “slow, unreckoning heart” is unable to keep up with the abstractions of “the Earth” or “Nature.” It needs something smaller to capture its power of affection. Schell himself wrote at the outset of The Fate of the Earth that “in spite of the immeasurable importance of nuclear weapons, the world has declined, on the whole, to think about them very much. We have thus far failed to fashion, or to discover within ourselves, an emotional or intellectual or political response to them.” Precisely.