I think about climate change a lot, and most of my job is working on concrete solutions to tackle climate change at a governmental level. The good news is that there is a very large and increasing group of people making more and more systemic changes towards sustainability. Things are different from ten, twenty years ago. Ideas that were fringe/sci-fi are now mainstream. My worry is not whether we can curb it, because I think we can, but that the exponential growth in sustainable solutions hasn't picked up fast enough to prevent a lot of harm and suffering.
One of the more important origins of the sustainability movement as we know it now was the 1972's Club of Rome report 'The Limits to Growth'. I am pretty sure that Le Guin was inspired by that, considering the publications are only two years apart. There are some people who still hold on to the idea of infinite, exponential growth, but I am definitely not one of them. For me, reading Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything was an eye opener in just how tightly related capitalism and climate change are.
What's funny is how many people made fun of Limits To Growth and how wrong World3 was when in fact, when you look at the numbers, they fucking nailed it.
