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The good news is staring us in face and we won’t engage. Carbon zero energy can be produced on the scale needed - advanced geothermal, solar, wind, plutonium-fuelled nuclear reactors – yet we won’t ramp up our investment. Energy use could be reduced by 50%, societies could become more fair and resilient, our cultural lives could become richer, more exciting. Do we really have to wait for some grand reckoning, a human/environmental disaster and loss of much of our biodiversity before we all collectively wise up?

An ethnographer I know who worked among peasant communities in the Amazon found that many of the people he met were obsessed by the idea of moving to the cities. In view of the hellish nature of many Brazilian favelas – especially in the booming Amazonian towns – he wanted to know why. “You have a wonderful life here: the rivers are teeming with fish, your gardens are crammed with food, you work an hour or two a day to meet your needs. You can’t read or write: if you move to the city, you’ll have to beg or steal or sell your body to survive,” he pointed out. “What you say is probably true,” they answered, “but in the city you can dream.”

L’ intelligenza non si sposa mai, per regola, nella televisione come nella vita, con i grandi numeri.

People forget that their lives will end soon.
For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.