Places that seemed to European explorers like Eden will now become uninhabitable, and everywhere, the attempt to master nature will leave us more subject to it. We pride ourselves on cleverness and we sought to remake the world with our knowledge. We looked to the future for consolation and to posterity for vindication. But unless we make a great turn, it seems safe to assume we will go down as the greatest fools who ever lived.

Yet, in a technocratic age, we still think in terms of plans and blueprints to be “implemented.” International institutions, even more than governments, are obsessed with targets and indicators. All this despite the evidence: The United Nations statistician Howard Friedman has found, for example, that, except for debt relief, none of the organization’s Millennium Development Goals had a discernible effect.

It is time, then, to consider a new kind of declaration. A declaration of responsibility, acknowledging what we have done and recognizing we were mistaken: a simple expression of collective responsibility for what is wrong.

There is a paradox of intention. The less such a declaration is designed to serve any purpose and the more sincerely it is made for its own sake, the greater purpose it would serve and the more transformative it would be. Eventually it could be adopted at the United Nations. It could borrow the opening words of the Charter, “We the peoples,” but should be the opposite of a U.N. resolution. It should be brief, memorable and vernacular: something all can turn over in their mind and adopt as their own if they choose. It should arise spontaneously, and not be appropriated by any organization. And there is no need for that dispiriting word “environment”; “nature" will do.

This declaration may sound negative, but the greatest challenge is to dispel the illusions that led us into such danger. Negation would be the greater part of creation, opening space for the germane wisdom of Western and every other culture. This “no” would also be a great affirmation, largely implicit, of higher values and a new disposition to the world. It would provide the rallying point that so many have lacked, countering a sense of impotence before impersonal forces. It would trade some vigor for decadence, help remedy the febrile triviality of public life, encourage the standing back our culture finds so hard and leave many quarrels behind. It would undercut more than one kind of hubris: for example, the postmodern view of nature as a social construct. It may be our best hope of breaking the terrible inertia: not the inertia of rest but of restless travel in the same direction.

Of course, there will be objections. For instance: Anything even remotely resembling repentance must be an oppressive relic of Christianity and so should be disqualified. This would be a momentous argument. First, it would prevent us from ever being truly sorry about anything. Second, it would disqualify many of the main tenets of secular Western society, which are clearly borrowed or repurposed from Christianity. The idea of a universal, linear movement toward salvation is uniquely Judeo-Christian.

Now we seek to remake a supposedly inhospitable world with knowledge. We glorify work, “the sweat of the brow,” and our “fortunate faults,” such as avarice, in the ancient belief that they enable our redemption. What is this? The attempt to remake Eden by the means of the fall?