Jan Zwicky, from Introduction to Hard Choices: Climate Change in Canada (edited by Harold Coward and Andrew J. Weaver).

Climate change is only one of several human-induced environmental---what?....crises? difficulties? challenges? Any noun I might choose has political spin, defines allegiances, presupposes a point of view. Robert Bringhurst puts the point succinctly:

Being will be here.
Beauty will be here.
But this beauty that visits us now will be gone.
---(1995, p. 200)

It is hubris to imagine our species can destroy everything, or even everything that matters to it, just as it is hubris to imagine we are what evolution is "for," or that human interests are distinct from and ontologically superior to all others.

"Why is there something rather than nothing?"---A question that has no answer, but one that is rooted in a fact that has absorbed and moved great thinkers from Lao Tzu to Heidegger. Which is not to say that you have to be a philosophical genius to experience astonishment that things exist: it's a common experience among the naturalists and poets of my acquaintance. [...] Our astonishment is the mark of our mortality. Is-ness is, always; but what is, this, is here only now. The love we feel for concrete particulars---a stand of birch, a stretch of river, no less than other human beings---is as biologically basic as our sexual mode of reproduction. We must love what dies and we must love because we die. Plato, like other religious thinkers in other traditions, sought to ease the pain attendant on this inheritance by encouraging us to fix our erotic gaze on eternity, on the non-particularized being that informs everything that is. But me, I'm with Herakleitos: "The things of which there is seeing, hearing, and perception, these do I prefer" (Diels, 1934, Fr. 55). I would be the last to deny the power of universal, atemporal being; it's just that because I'm human---that is, because I love and die---it's only half the story. "Nameless:" says the Tao Te Ching, "the origin of heaven and earth./ Naming: the mother of ten thousand things" (1993, chap. 1). Those ten thousand things are the other half of the story. They are the manifestations through which the mystery flows, without which it would be invisible, of which we are one. We hope because, quite apart from the philosophers, we have good reason to believe that beauty will be here: there will be trees and grass and rivers and, unless we are staggeringly stupid, a few humans around to appreciate them. We grieve because we also have reason to believe that this beauty---at least some among these copses, these grasslands, these shorelines---will not survive. That is what this book is about: the grounds for that hope, and that grief.

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