I know, been a long time again---working with other media and doing a lot of reading. One of the things I've been struggling with is WHY there is less and less interest on the part of the governments, organizations, etc to directly deal with the fairly clear immediate effects of climate change and the dire prospects for future generations. A couple days ago I awoke in the middle of the night with the revelation outlined below---jotted most of it down in an email to a friend. Now that it's set down in writing, it seems obvious, but the idea of such a global fail is initially difficult to grasp. Unpleasant though it may be, understanding this illogical foundation for current actions may facilitate creation of some structure offering alternative paths into the future.
It is pretty clear from the fossil record that Mother Earth's Laws of Nature have produced some striking mass extinctions in the past--so the belief we don't need to fear any dire consequences from climate change seems a little naive. Major environmental shifts have occurred and will again. The driving force may be a bit different in our present predicament, but the Laws of Nature producing the global impacts are the same as in the past. That's why we call them LAWS!
The actions occurring now suggest THREE possibilities.
1. The institutions, corporations, governments, etc. sincerely believe that their power, money, control and political skill can suspend or modify the laws of nature. Specifically, they operate as though climate change is an optional politically malleable process, subject to spin doctors, expedient protocols and innovative interpretation, all designed to further the advance of chosen agendas. In this scenario Mother Earth is not perceived as the final judge of human conduct in the allocation of resources.
2. A more ominous possibility is that those institutions, etc. ACTUALLY DO understand the laws of nature and the role of Mother Earth in determining the future in a very definite way---according to HER LAWS--and they don't care. They are willing to incur the long term consequences of a planet supersaturated with human population and far beyond a tipping point, beyond which a marked reduction in population is inevitable in reaching a new equilibrium at a horizon marked by far less quality of life. In other words, to achieve their immediate agendas, the future be damned.
3. Finally there's a religious slant supposing that humans have dominion over the earth and a supreme being acting on their behalf will change the laws of nature in a timely way so things remain just fine for all, or at least those believing in the correct supreme being. Population or energy use won't matter in this divine world. This sort of magic is a little overdue, but perhaps the supreme being is waiting to maximize the PR opportunity created by an increasingly desperate humanity.
These three possibilities are fairly obvious. What is not obvious is why the public looks to politicians, corporate heads and religious leaders for information on climate change and repeatedly chooses to disregard the scientists who work for relatively low compensation their entire professional lives to achieve understanding of climatology, ecology and various other related disciplines. Our society apparently suffers from mass delusion created by the institutions for the benefit of the institutions.
My bet is on Mother Nature and her laws. I won't be around to see how things turn out---and I'm glad I won't be. The future is not likely to be pretty.
In the meantime, anything we can do to delay the apparently inevitable massive adjustment of population size and degradation in quality of life is worth the effort. Individuals must take initiative, because human society is apparently unable to cope effectively with the scale of the problem presented by an extreme addiction to excessive carbon loading.
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