Wolfgang Knorr

Heroism and hope in these times are only possible against a backdrop of total relinquishment to the possibility that we won’t be able to control our own fate. But on a deeper level, this will be the way for us to reconnect with our origins, to become one again with the natural world.

The climate crisis is not only an extreme case of a collective challenge, but also an extremely complex one. Conventional notions of expertise and specialisation are therefore failing. The essence of radical honesty is to recognise this failure of our conventional ideas and to draw lessons from it.

Resilience is the weak point of the economic-social-political system we have come to know as the “West”.

There is no stopping climate breakdown without stopping moral decay and the death of democracy.

We should not kid ourselves: the looming danger of planetary heating is that seismic shifts in our global society will be inevitable, brought about by a combination of voluntary or forced adaptation and impacts, and that a hapless elite, unable to face reality, will sleepwalk us all into catastrophe.

At a time when Western leaders, fearful of losing control, drive us down dangerous confrontational paths – with other countries, or with the biosphere – disobedience, not attention grabbing, is the call of the moment.