THE WICKED PROBLEM OF OUR FAILING SOCIAL COMPACT: with Karl E. Peters, “Living with the Wicked Problem of Climate Change”; Paul H. Carr, “What Is Climate Change Doing to Us and for Us?”; James Clement van Pelt, “Climate Change in Context: Stress, Shock, and the Crucible of Livingkind”; Robert S. Pickart, “Climate Change at High Latitudes: An Illuminating Example”; Emily E. Austin, “Soil Carbon Transformations”; David A. Larrabee, “Climate Change and Conflicting Future Visions”; Panu Pihkala, “Eco‐Anxiety, Tragedy, and Hope: Psychological and Sp

The United States is an outlier among nations in its failure to adopt robust climate policy. The underlying cause is not unique to the climate issue. Climate, like growing national debt, embodies a trade‐off between individual consumption now versus investment yielding long‐term societal gain. Over human history, social norms favoring one over the other wax and wane with the pervasiveness of transcendental values as embodied in personal virtue, social connectedness, spirituality, and religious faith. Over the past few decades, many indicators show that American social norms and extended cooperation have weakened. Given entrenched political corruption and continuing institutional failure to address multiple long‐term societal challenges, individuals are called upon personally to practice and to enforce pro‐social norms and to advance high‐leverage systemic changes, some identified in this article, which will allow extended cooperation to once again flourish.