“Climate change” says NYT environment reporter Andy Revkin, “is not the story of our time. Climate change is a subset of the story of our time, which is that we are coming of age on a finite planet and only just now recognizing that it is finite.”

Revkin, after more than 25 years as an environmental journalist, has had more time to contemplate that story than most – so it’s no surprise that he’s put together one of the best distillations of the sustainability “story” I’ve heard. He pointed recently, via Twitter, to video of his speech at the annual Headwaters Gathering at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, where he spoke briefly about climate, growing up, and the prospect of 1 billion teenagers on planet Earth.

This notion that we’re heading toward – or are currently in – a moment in time where human activity breaches thresholds of environmental change to dramatic effect is really, really powerful. The thousands of bits of environmental science we’ve accumulated over the last half century or so – from atmospheric chemistry to rainforest ecology to marine biology – add up, like a photo mosaic, to a story about limits and thresholds. Of course, the non-predictive nature of science means that this “moment” may not really be a moment at all – it might be a long and increasingly turbulent series of bumps and jolts dragged out over years or decades. But in the long marathon of geologic time, it becomes a moment – and one that, for us, means we really do live in a particularly special time. In response to all that, Revkin poses this question:

“We’ve spiked from 1 billion to 6,7 billion people – headed toward 9 – before something happens. And is that a soft landing – a soft transition – or is it a real hard knock? That is the question of our time. And climate is a subset of that question…We have to ask ourselves as a species: What do I want to be when I grow up?”

There’s been some attempt to assign grasp-able names  to the “hard knock” scenario, with “Peak Everything” and Paul Gilding’s “The Great Disruption” being among the most well-known. The problem, of course, with the concept of Doom Around the Corner is that it has an embarrassing history (Nostradamus and Chicken Little come to mind). But as much fire as these names might draw from the peanut gallery of  detractors and skeptics, they help to tell a story about the future, about change, and about our relationship with nature. And today, when change seems to blaze by faster than ever, a story might be exactly what’s needed to feel at home in a world where “normal” becomes an increasingly confused and meaningless word.

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