As the coming climate collapse nears, our world responds as expected, driven by self-interest as if there were no tomorrow. Scientists warn us, ever avoiding an alarmism unbecoming of their profession. Corporate executives lead their industries, ever responsible to the economic interests of their investors. The voting public go about their lives largely unaware of the warnings and motivated mainly by their individual economies and freedoms. And statesmen steer us into the future, negotiating between these forces, ever careful to compromise what they must so that they may do anything at all.

Such as things are, it appears our present course will end with rising seas, exhausted agriculture, and other threats to our habitat so severe that we can only wonder whether we are not failing as a species. The once professor and now independent climatologist Guy McPherson is one such critic of our human nature and civilization. In a recent article announcing a talk in Berkeley and a longer essay in which he has collected extensive evidence of both our changing climate and our society’s response to the warnings, McPherson sounds an alarm of existential threat. Not only is the warming climate changing our world, it is on an increasingly severe and irreversible course. More than this, our world’s leaders are irrationally idle or cynically enabling the worst possible outcomes. Especially to blame, are the profiteering capitalists who care only for themselves and who purchase the consent of the scientists and the politicians by way of university and campaign contributions. Unencumbered by the academic conservatism he left behind, McPherson goes so far as to warn of the near-term extinction of the human species. “Save the Humans!” he seems to call out, but any efforts to save us, he believes, are too little and too late.

On the whole and especially on the climatological facts, I found very little to object to. Melting poles and monster storms are evidence enough for me, considering the costs of underestimating our power for ecological ruin. I appreciate the alarms, and am myself thoroughly alarmed.

I do take issue with his bleak view of human nature and humanity’s prospects, however. To begin with, I very much doubt that our extinction is coming soon. Humanity will adapt, I believe, and I find his analogy to other species or to our prehistorical past unpersuasive. But by humanity I mean the species, not the current population. Even if the population must fall to 10 million people, scattered through the remnant habitats, humanity does not depend on specific ecosystems in the same way that other species do. This is both our strength and also ultimately the cause of the coming collapse.

To be sure, this is a quibble. To argue whether we are destined to extinction or only a massive culling is to miss the premise already agreed, namely that humanity has overreached, too few have taken notice, of those who have taken notice too few have the power to stop our course, of those who have the power too few are willing, and those who are willing have too little company. If there was ever a need for a benevolent dictator, this is it.

“Any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.” -Homer, Illiad

McPherson begins one of his articles with this quote, and perhaps this is a guide to what is happening in our time. It may seem irrational for us to commit suicide as a species, but this I believe is an overly compassionate perspective. Whether humanity goes extinct in the near future or not, every one of us alive today will very soon be dead. By the year 2200, all of us will be dead. By the year 2100, nearly everyone who has already reached adulthood will be dead. By 2050, nearly everyone who is today in a position of geopolitical power, private or public, will be dead. And every one of us, of any age or position, dies a little every day. We will never be as beautiful as we are today. We will never be here again.

The opposition between the public and private geopolitical power is not one between caring and not caring for the future. This is a fantasy relic of the ideological wars of the last century, pitting in a death struggle, the forces of public and private control over our economies and states. Instead, the difference is at best one of scale. Public practical reason, i.e. reasoned decision about what to do, is long-term by nature as it concerns the collective lives of entire populations, inclusive of every voter as well as the lives of their children. Private practical reason by contrast is short-term by nature as it concerns the individual lives of the owners, and as we observed, this has a horizon of roughly half a lifetime. Private individuals have children too, of course. Every individual makes private as well as public choices, but generally speaking these do not overlap. Consider the left-leaning executive of an oil corporation. Even if his personal practical reasoning is long-term, he can at best provide financially for his children and as an extreme measure divest from oil securities and quit his career. But the corporation will continue as a new executive assumes the job and the shares are sold to another investor. A long-term public perspective is typically only longer by maybe half a century for similar reasons. The voting public cares for itself and its children, but a politician who thinks too many generations into the future invariably gives way to his replacement, a rival more attentive to the voter’s immediate concerns. Even the spiritually expansive pre-Columbian Native Americans, unafflicted by either democracy or industrialization, saw only seven generations ahead of their own, a mere two centuries.

Practical reason by its very nature has a finite time horizon. This is not a failing of humanity as much as it is in the nature of practical reason itself. Suppose we were to avert climate disaster and secure humanity into the indefinite future. How long would we have? How far into the future would we have a duty to safeguard our descendants? Should we prepare for the eruptions of super-volcanos? What of when the sun boils the oceans or when the heat death of the universe itself kills every last remaining spark? Death is an inescapable fact. Each of us individually must die. The species must die. The planet must die. The universe itself must die. Our every moment dies as it passes. We postpone the end, when it rationally interests us to do so, but we never cancel it.

McPherson cites Robert Heinlein who said we are not rational animals but rationalizing animals. Why would seeing us walk into the abyss spur us to doubt our very rationality? Only an idealism that sees practical reason as aiming for an eternal human presence in current or improving forms could culminate in such despair. Only a prior faith in Progress or in Balance with Nature could lead to any disappointment. Rather, it is this very faith that is rooted in unreason, not the unsustainable lives that deviate from the imagined ideal.

What I am arguing is that postponing this collapse is not in the rational interests of those who have the power to do anything about it, and those of us without power are not so different as we imagine. Our self-destruction is not irrational. It is only tragic.