On the Need to Think Big

I read the climate issue with great interest — but I’m now reading the letters (June 2023), from alumni who believe that the solutions to the terrifying global climate crisis are to focus on individual choices, retrofit your house, replace a zillion cars with a zillion EVs, buy carbon offsets, triple down on nuclear power, continue to rely on fossil fuels, and deny that the crisis is happening at all.

All of which don't even begin to acknowledge the huge, systemic transformations that this challenge demands — to entirely rethink our toxic industrial practices and growth-obsessed consumer economy, which are the root causes of the climate crisis … and also the plastics crisis, the groundwater crisis, and the ongoing collapse of the ecosystems we depend on to live.

Did you really not receive a single letter that urged Princetonians to think big? — and that advocate for solutions that match the almost unimaginable magnitude of these crises? 

I can only hope so, or I’d be hard put to find any hope at all.