Not long before the Nazis murdered him, the Lutheran pastor and resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “the ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children”.

That moral challenge is timeless. But with the climate emergency upon us, it has an unsettling new edge, and with that in mind, I’ve been preoccupied lately by the under-appreciated power of solidarity.

Because the chances that a child in the next century will feel gentle sunlight against her skin, or hear birdsong, or see native animals in the wild, or even live some part of the year outside of a storm shelter, will depend on the degree to which we can manifest fellow feeling for her now.

To be a moral society, we need to rediscover and restore solidarity – with our Earth, and with its creatures and peoples.

But solidarity is anathema to capitalism, especially the brute version that’s spread and metastasized in the past 40 years. Fellow-feeling has been trained out of us. Two generations have been raised to fight a war of all against all, rendering us competitors and consumers when we could have been citizens and allies.

To face the anguish and chaos of climate breakdown, which is the miserable legacy of fossil capitalism, or business-as-usual, we’ll need to skill up again and retrieve the best in ourselves. Only then do we stand a chance of not consigning our descendants to hell.

I have no neat answer for how to revive solidarity. But I’m certain it won’t emerge from the pitiless dog-eat-dog mentality that got us into this crisis. Nor will it spring from those who revere convention, crave respectability and align themselves with the powerful against the weak.

Moments of real human progress – from the abolition of slavery to the advent of workers’ rights and the struggle for women’s suffrage – have always sprung from empathy, vulnerability, imagination and disruption. From new concepts born in adversity. From fresh language that’s honest and calls out injustice, emboldening resistance and inspiring courage. And in deeds that are audacious,........

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