Apologies to the Grandchildren

As many of you know, I have seven grandchildren. The oldest celebrated her 38^th birthday in January, so I have been a grandfather for 38 years now. In 2022, two of my granddaughters became mothers, so now I also have two precious great-grandchildren, the first born a year ago last month.

I have been thinking about my grandchildren in a new way because of reading two books written to or for grandchildren. Those books are closely related to my January 28 blog post.

Larry R. Rasmussen’s book The Planet You Inherit was published last year. Its subtitle is Letters to My Grandchildren When Uncertainty’s a Sure Thing. I had the privilege of writing a review of that book for The Englewood Review of Books, and you can read that review here.

Rasmussen (b. 1939) is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics, emeritus, at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Among his published books are Earth Community, Earth Ethics (1996) and Earth Honoring Faith (2013).

It is no surprise that the letters written to Eduardo and Martin Rasmussen Villegas (b. 2015 and 2018), his two grandchildren, are primarily related to his many years of ecotheological teaching and writing.

While the letters clearly express the writer’s love for his two young grandsons, it will likely be 2035 and beyond before they will be able to comprehend the meaning and significance of those letters.

Maybe, though, the writer’s intention was to say important things to us adults who read those letters now, as well as to Eduardo and Martin, who will be reading them much later.

One of Rasmussen’s most important letters is titled “Responsible by Degrees,” written in August 2020. There he broached the possibility of “widespread civilizational collapse”—and asserts that “we know we must put an end to a growing, extractive economy running on ecological deficits.”

Rasmussen, though, has hopeful views about humanity’s ability to confront the current and coming ecological crisis effectively, and those views need to be pondered thoughtfully.

Still, this challenging book written for the author’s young grandsons needs to be balanced with careful consideration of more realistic views about what is most likely to occur in Eduardo’s and Martin’s lifetime.

William Ophuls’s Apologies to the Grandchildren is a 2018 book of essays, the first one bearing the same title as the book, which does give a more realistic and less hopeful view of the current ecological crisis.

(I first learned of Ophuls, born in 1934 and with a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1973, from the video by Michael Dowd that I introduced in my January 28^th blog post linked to above).

Ophuls begins his essay with stark words: ”Civilization is, by its very nature, a long-running Ponzi scheme. It lives by robbing nature and borrowing from the future, exploiting its hinterland until there is nothing left to exploit, after which it implodes.”

He continues by saying that civilization “generates a temporary and fictitious surplus that it uses to enrich and empower the few and to dispossess and dominate the many. Industrial civilization is the apotheosis and quintessence of this fatal course.”

He goes on to write these blunt words to the grandchildren, “A fortunate minority gains luxuries and freedoms galore, but only by slaughtering, poisoning, and exhausting creation. So we bequeath you a ruined planet that dooms you to a hardscrabble existence, or perhaps none at all” (p. 1)

What Can We Say/Do? While I would like to embrace Rasmussen’s hopeful view, I have become convinced by Ophuls and by Dowd—as well as by William Catton, whom I plan to introduce in later blog posts—that my grandchildren and their children will experience a world of increasing gloom.

Perhaps there is still time for necessary changes to be made, but that is doubtful—and there is little evidence to indicate that such changes will likely be made. Perhaps, sadly, little can realistically be done other than to offer deep apologies to the grandchildren.

Yet, surely, we can work toward pushing the impending collapse farther into the future and encourage the grandchildren to find ways to flourish now in the present, regardless of what looms in a future that, unfortunately, may not be as uncertain as Rasmussen thinks.