Too stupid to stop
I wrote an unoptimistic column for The Freethinker. I think about the paradox a lot.
Humans are so clever in some ways. We came up with poetry, music, airplanes, the Mars Rover – but at the same time we’re too stupid to stop sawing off the branch we’re sitting on.
Stupid as a species, that is. It’s not really because individuals are stupid that we can’t stop the march to the cliff, it’s because individuals are individuals. It feels futile to try to do anything about the approaching doom when everyone else is still merrily building apartment towers and driving cars and burning down the Amazon rain forest. What’s the point?
So we’ll keep on drilling for oil and flying around the world for business meetings and building houses in flood plains and wildfire zones until the last condo disappears under the waves.
If we could just get all 7 billion of us together in a room…
That sounds a lot like my lectures, except I’m not allowed to use the word stupid. (You know, the feelings.) I use the image of Wile E. Coyote hovering off the cliff while the Road Runner has stopped just at the edge. I tell my students Environmental Science is about discovering whether we are the road runner or the coyote. Eventually, I think they figure out we’re the coyote, hovering over the cliff, not aware of our danger until we look down.
The problem with environmental failure is that we often don’t see it until it is past the failsafe zone. Oh, the scientists can see and predict it, but we can’t be certain about whens and wheres, so everyone shrugs their shoulders and goes on about their business, sort of thinking if they never look down, they can remain suspended in air indefinitely.
But we are not cartoons, and we can’t defy gravity.
I didn’t entirely allow myself to use the word stupid. It’s stupid of us as a species, but as individuals it’s not quite that simple.The Wile E. Coyote image is perfect!
People dealing with things that aren’t right in front of them is problematic. Hanging out in climate controlled spaces surely makes it easier to ignore the bigger picture. Some of the mass polluters have been made to clean up their act since maybe the 60’s?… I do remember as a kid seeing (undoubtedly toxic) dark smoke pouring out of factories, which I don’t see any more, but progress is slow.
7 billion in a room together? Not me, it’s all I can do to make it to the theater. ;)
Ditto. It’s fortunate for me that my husband and I like the kind of movies that don’t attract a huge audience (except when we went to see Benedict Cumberbatch play Hamlet, and I think the mostly young audience was there more for Cumberbatch than for Hamlet).
Nice Ikn @4, I wish I could have caught that show! I have Branagh’s ’96 unabridged version (my favorite) that I break out and watch from time to time, and the last live production of Hamlet I saw was at a neighborhood park by a small local troupe, which I also enjoyed immensely. :)
Maybe it lends credence to the group selection theory (at least for humans)?
Been listening to the “Fall of Civilizations” podcast a bunch and it just seems like the same pattern as before blown up to a global scale. Civilization breaks when maintaining it becomes unsustainable for the population size; humans will likely survive but much diminished, at least for a while.
Until now “breaking” civilizations had been more local in scope. Neighbouring societies still continued, and new ones arose. This will be the first fall of a planet-wide civilization. To add another, unprecedented complication, some mebers of this civilization posses nuclear weapons, which will hold power and influence after imaginary money has lost the value that people give it. Will countries with these weapons stay their hands when their citizens demand food and water that they think can be taken from those who are believed to still posses them? Or will there be rupture within these countries themselves, along class lines, as the hyper-rich try to buy their way into whatever future they can, hiring, or seizing control of any means of force they believe will help keep them on the top of the sinking heap, against the masses of poor and desperate people they helped to create?
So if anyone ever does a forensic analysis of Where We Went Wrong, I wonder what they will decide? Was there a big, bad step that we should not have taken? Or was it a whole bunch of little bad steps, none of which were by themselves fatal, but, when taken together, did the trick?
We climb the highest mountain
We’ll make the desert bloom
We’re so ingenious
We can walk on the moon
But when I hear of how
The forests have died
Saltwater wells in my eyes
“we can’t be certain about whens and wheres” iknklast #1
This is a feature of using computer models (Sabine Hossenfelder interviews Tim Palmer, Oxford climate scientist https://youtu.be/-fkCo_trbT8 (35:33 min) Did scientists get climate change wrong? Nov 15, 2019).
Neil Halloran suggests we use the uncertainty to look for opportunities. (https://youtu.be/R7FAAfK78_M 24:08 A Skeptical Look at Climate Science Apr 22, 2021)
“Where We Went Wrong” YNNB #8
Well, that’s a big one. I can’t imagine the state of mind of a young person today coming out of the COVID pandemic and entering the Uni.
I recall listening to the daughter of a neighbor talking enthusiastically about an interdisciplinary course attempting to bring literacy to issues like climate change, for mental health as much as anything. (She became a nurse.)
Hope Jahren talks calmly and concretely (and with a sense of humor) about where we went wrong. I think The Story of More was based on a course.
And who’s “we”? Well, certainly me, for one. People who try to explain stuff with computer models (see above), science … Maybe we think we can speak for Nature. Maybe the world isn’t made for human utility. Maybe we’re playing the Finite Game (Carse).
Perhaps some indigenous peoples have not deceived themselves.
Holms #9
Richard Powers, “The Overstory”