In the late 1990s, the social scientist and author Mayer Hillman predicted that, in the future, our children and grandchildren would ask us what we did to prevent global climate catastrophe. Twenty years later Greta Thunberg, addressing the UN, thundered: “You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you.”
Twenty-five years ago, Hillman also warned that public denial of the climate crisis would only begin to crack when people in the global north were personally affected – by the creation of millions of environmental refugees from uninhabitable parts of the world, for instance, or after their homes had been flooded several times over and they could no longer insure them.
