Postscript: A Different Beginning?

Abstract

On 17 September 1998 BBC News made the following announcement under the headline ‘The sky is falling’: ‘The height of the sky has dropped by 8km in the last 38 years, according to scientists from the British Antarctic Survey. Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are believed to be responsible for creating the effect.’¹ This is not a metaphysical lapsus of the sort that caused Adam and Eve to be ejected from the Garden of unreflexive consciousness. It is one of myriad physical and terrestrial processes and events which have been occasioned by the cumulative impact of human action on the ecosystem, and whose long-term repercussions will be felt, not only in the meteorological atmosphere, but in the spiritual and ethical atmosphere of human society as well, the Zeitgeist. For as Ernest Becker stated perceptively at a time when global warming was no more than an anxious twinkle in the eye of some ‘zany’ scientists.