This is the choice David Buckel made one crisp April morning, when he walked from his Brooklyn apartment to Prospect Park, doused himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire. He was in good health. He had a partner and a daughter. While some might be inclined to ascribe his suicide to mental illness, the letters he left make it clear that his act was political. “Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather,” he wrote. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”

Buckel’s self-sacrifice takes the logic of personal choice to its ultimate end. But like most of us, I can’t or won’t make that choice. I’m committed to life in this world, the world I live in, in all its stupidity and suffering, because this world is the one everyone else lives in too: my colleagues and students, my friends and family, my partner and daughter. This world is the only one in which my choices have meaning. And this world, doomed as it is, is the only one that offers joy.

When my daughter was born I felt a love and connection I’d never felt before: a surge of tenderness harrowing in its intensity. I knew that I would kill for her, die for her, sacrifice anything for her, and while those feelings have become more bearable since the first delirious days after her birth, they have not abated. And when I think of the future she’s doomed to live out, the future we’ve created, I’m filled with rage and sorrow.

Every day brings new pangs of grief. Seeing the world afresh through my daughter’s eyes fills me with delight, but every new discovery is haunted by death. Reading to her from “Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?,” I can’t help marveling at the disconnect between the animal life pictured in that book and the mass extinction happening right now across the planet. When I sing along with Elizabeth Mitchell’s version of “Froggie Went a-Courtin’,” I can’t help feeling like I’m betraying my daughter by filling her brain with fantastic images of a magical nonhuman world, when the actual nonhuman world has been exploited and despoiled. How can I read her “Winnie the Pooh” or “The Wind in the Willows” when I know the pastoral harmony they evoke is lost to us forever, and has been for decades? How soon do I explain to her what’s happening? In all the most important ways, it’s already too late.

Our children will not face the choices we face. They won’t have the opportunities we now have for action. They’ll confront a range of outcomes whose limits were determined by the choices we made. Yet while some degree of warming now appears inevitable, the range of possible outcomes over the next century is wide enough and the worst outcomes extreme enough that there is some narrow hope that revolutionary socio-economic transformation today might save billions of human lives and preserve global civilization as we know it in more or less recognizable form, or at least stave off human extinction. But the range of outcomes decreases every day, shifting month by month toward the more apocalyptic end of the spectrum, and waiting even five years may see the window for saving humanity shut.

We live in the gap between the wind and the whirlwind, but taking that gap for a reprieve is a mistake. The catastrophe is now, even if it’s almost impossible for most of us to see it. That very dissonance is perhaps the defining truth of our era, the key to its anxious, bipolar character.

The real choice we all face is not what to buy, whether to fly or whether to have children but whether we are willing to commit to living ethically in a broken world, a world in which human beings are dependent for collective survival on a kind of ecological grace. There is no utopia, no Planet B, no salvation, no escape. We’re all stuck here together. And living in that world, the only world there is, means giving up any claims to innocence or moral purity, since to live at all means to cause suffering.