It's not about "the climate," it's not about "the environment," it's never been about that. It's about human survival on the planet. Why the heck is that so hard to understand?
And still people don't believe it's happening. My dental hygienist for example and she's youngish. Has a 12 year old son. Well, the planet will be better off without humans.
yes, i always think the term climate change, is poorly chosen. To me that the climate is changing is not the problem, is it human survival? I think we are all at a bit of a loss to what to call it, or what to do. To me what is clear; that we cannot go on the way we do.
If we look back eighty years (I mean if I do, not you) is there some kind of ghastly parallel? The Manhattan Project was born and maintained in great secrecy; as was the eventual decision to drop the bomb. It was possible to do this because the larger nations were at war. It is, of course, impossible to imagine the aims of the Project being pursued in peacetime and perhaps just as well. Quite conceivably the bomb would never have been dropped.
Amen to all that, we say. And yet were there salutary benefits to dropping the bomb? Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided horrific evidence of what it could do and from this has grown the uneasy international agreement that is presently getting a work-out in the Ukraine. But we must remind ourselves that other, less rational, regimes were developing the bomb in the forties; without the evidential spectre of those two Japanese cities might one of these regimes have subsequentially dropped the bomb in support of its mad aims.
Horror, you might say, has its uses.
Unfortunately there is is only incremental and - to some extent - circumstantial evidence to hint at what the end of humanity would look like.No "helpful" Hiroshima here. And because the end of humanity is oblivion our imagination baulks at tackling non-existence. In effect we tell ourselves it is too universal, too unthinkable, therefore it cannot happen. Hope outweighs likelihood. Photos of those six giraffe corpses, stuck in the mud and thus dead from starvation, are powerful but, in the end, too distant. There are no giraffes on Main Street, Anywheresville, Planet Earth.
Even more applicable disasters like the tsunami and the flooding in Bangladesh are dismissed as nature "taking its normal course". But not here. Fires in California? Serves 'em right for voting Democrat.
What then? To shake us out of our intellectual lethargy? A smallish but developed country - Belgium, say - completely wiped out by a combination of drought, flooding, right-wing thought, tribal warfare and The Plague. But am I playing the Chaconne on a violin reduced to one out-of-tune string? Is it too late? Worse, was it always too late?
People want other people to do something so that it doesn't inconvenience them.
ReplyDeleteA great video. An unfolding tragedy told quite well.
ReplyDeleteIt's such a simple truth, really. Why can't we grasp it? We think "other people" will do the work and save us. Humans, man.
ReplyDeleteI think humans have an amazing capacity to live in denial.
ReplyDeleteAnd still people don't believe it's happening. My dental hygienist for example and she's youngish. Has a 12 year old son. Well, the planet will be better off without humans.
ReplyDeleteyes, i always think the term climate change, is poorly chosen. To me that the climate is changing is not the problem, is it human survival? I think we are all at a bit of a loss to what to call it, or what to do. To me what is clear; that we cannot go on the way we do.
ReplyDeleteIf we look back eighty years (I mean if I do, not you) is there some kind of ghastly parallel? The Manhattan Project was born and maintained in great secrecy; as was the eventual decision to drop the bomb. It was possible to do this because the larger nations were at war. It is, of course, impossible to imagine the aims of the Project being pursued in peacetime and perhaps just as well. Quite conceivably the bomb would never have been dropped.
ReplyDeleteAmen to all that, we say. And yet were there salutary benefits to dropping the bomb? Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided horrific evidence of what it could do and from this has grown the uneasy international agreement that is presently getting a work-out in the Ukraine. But we must remind ourselves that other, less rational, regimes were developing the bomb in the forties; without the evidential spectre of those two Japanese cities might one of these regimes have subsequentially dropped the bomb in support of its mad aims.
Horror, you might say, has its uses.
Unfortunately there is is only incremental and - to some extent - circumstantial evidence to hint at what the end of humanity would look like.No "helpful" Hiroshima here. And because the end of humanity is oblivion our imagination baulks at tackling non-existence. In effect we tell ourselves it is too universal, too unthinkable, therefore it cannot happen. Hope outweighs likelihood. Photos of those six giraffe corpses, stuck in the mud and thus dead from starvation, are powerful but, in the end, too distant. There are no giraffes on Main Street, Anywheresville, Planet Earth.
Even more applicable disasters like the tsunami and the flooding in Bangladesh are dismissed as nature "taking its normal course". But not here. Fires in California? Serves 'em right for voting Democrat.
What then? To shake us out of our intellectual lethargy? A smallish but developed country - Belgium, say - completely wiped out by a combination of drought, flooding, right-wing thought, tribal warfare and The Plague. But am I playing the Chaconne on a violin reduced to one out-of-tune string? Is it too late? Worse, was it always too late?