It was almost exactly 100 years ago (in December 1920) that Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice” was first published. The poem goes like this: “Some say the world will end in fire, / some say in ice. / From what I’ve tasted of desire, / I hold with those who favor fire. / But if it had to perish twice, / I think I know enough of hate / to say that for destruction ice / is also great, / and would suffice.” These deceptively simple words from a century ago provide a powerful searchlight into our own time, radically illuminating the dire situation we are in as we stagger into this pivotal election year.

Let’s start with fire. I invite you to imagine sitting, perhaps with a few family members, around the stove on a cold February night. Now imagine that the damper is wide open, the stack gauge straining at the extreme top edge of “overfire” and the stovepipe glowing cherry red. Yet no one steps over and shuts it down. In fact, the only response is to open the door and throw a few more chunks of wood into the already-raging inferno. Any reasonable person would judge such behavior to be not merely irresponsible but insane, endangering the whole house and everyone in it. The obvious thing to do would be to shut the damper and slow down the fire before everything goes up in flames.

This scenario is exactly analogous to the environmental and economic conditions we have created over the last 50 years and that now threaten to destroy us. A recent analysis indicated that our extractive consumerist “civilization” requires 1.7 planets’ worth of resources to keep going. This is an unsustainable condition known as “overshoot” (“overfire” in our analogy). In his indispensable little book “Future Scenarios” (2009), David Holmgren, the co-founder of permaculture, puts this into its wider context. There are, he says, only four possibilities: “Techno-Explosion” (continued growth, “business as usual”), “Techno-Stability (moving toward a steady-state level of consumption), Energy Descent (an intentional strategic dialing back of our energy needs to align them with the planet’s carrying capacity), or Collapse. The first two do not solve the “overfire” problem because they continue to require resource extraction in excess of what the planet can sustain, thus leading inevitably to “Collapse” — the moment when the house burns down. The only sane thing to do is to shut the damper, i.e., to embrace Energy Descent. And that is the one thing we’re not doing. Few if any people, including our politicians, have even heard of it.

Heedless of the long-term welfare of all life on the planet, we thus continue to pursue what Michael Klare (2012) calls “the race for what’s left” with its ever-more-extreme pillaging of the world’s resources to keep our greedy desire-driven system going. Eventually, however, it will be “game over.” President Trump’s boasting about our supposedly strong economy is, from this perspective, not the great news he claims it is but rather the harbinger of approaching disaster. As our woodstove analogy makes clear, if we continue on our present insane course, America’s future will indeed be “blazing bright,” but not in the way he imagines it.

Which brings us to the “ice” part of Frost’s poem. All life forms, such as goldfish in a tank or coral reefs in the sea, can only survive within a certain range of conditions. Democracy also, like goldfish and coral, is calibrated to a specific environment that enables its survival, outside of which it will wobble and eventually die. This environment is characterized by diversity, respect for truth, reasoned debate and a concern for the common good. The hatred spewing forth not just from the White House but, now, from all sectors of society, is Frost’s ice, the second route to destruction. It destroys the conditions on which democracy depends. Every time we sneer at some “liberal snowflake” or “race traitor,” or (alternatively) dismiss President Trump as a “moronic thug,” we are pouring, each one of us, more of hate’s icy poison into America’s fish tank, and then wondering why democracy is imperiled. The impeachment trial in Washington amounted to little more than poking a sickly fish with a stick to get it to swim straight in a medium increasingly toxic to it. If our democratic system is to survive, we have to take a necessary but radical step: Stop freezing the water.

Two things are especially frightening about our situation. One is that, though Frost’s poem presents us with two alternative options for destruction (“But if I had to perish twice…”), we have embraced, with the help and example of the president, both of them together, staring in stupefied fascination at a roaring stove about to blow while hating each other too much to talk about ways to prevent a suicidal explosion. The other is that not one of our candidates for national office is talking about any of this. Wrapped in the ideological cocoon of “deregulation” (opening the stove door wider) and “economic growth” (throwing in more wood), and relying on negative campaigning (dumping in more of hatred’s ice), they’re completely ignoring the two fundamental issues we need to be addressing: how to embark on the path of Energy Descent, and how to rewarm the water in our cultural tank before democracy itself goes belly up and we’ve lost the country for good — perhaps, as some observers have begun to fear, in a second civil war.

We need, therefore, to demand, and demand loudly, that our candidates stop their lying, distortions and vicious ad hominem attacks, and that they begin instead to address these issues front and center. At the same time, we need to do our individual parts to help rewarm our cultural water by ridding ourselves of the hatreds that are freezing democracy dead even as I write these words.

Our country is in peril. Act now. We may already be too late.

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John Radigan lives in Saranac Lake.

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(Correction: An earlier version of this commentary slightly misquoted the Robert Frost people “Fire and Ice,” giving one line as “But if I had to perish twice” instead the correct “But if it had to perish twice,” with “it” being the world.)