No. I'm currently following a course on Political Ecology, a field I didn't know existed until now but is interesting nevertheless. As I understand it now, political ecology posits that ecological issues (ranging from local policies to global climate change) are based around power. Natural resources give power (money) to companies / NGOs that control them. Those parties can then use that power to influence policies in their favor. Later on in the course we'll look at climate change in-depth, but right now I think climate change is also a problem of power, not necessarily one of incompetence or malignant behaviour.
In 2006 a study predicted all ocean fish will be extinct by 2048. In 2010 the UN predicted that all ocean fish could be extinct by 2050. In 2011 the International Panel on the State of The Ocean (PDF) concluded: I am not aware of anything being done. People still buy fish at the supermarket. The oceans may well lose their fish within our lifetimes or our children's. After that how does the Earth continue? Are we really going to pretend that such a huge mass extinction will not change or destroy the lives of creatures we feel closer to, including people? I post articles about these kinds of things to reddit from time to time. They get maybe 5 to 10 upvotes. Meanwhile people are very concerned about whether their new cellphone has more pixels on the screen than the previous one, or a slight increase in processor speed. Our consumer culture has infantilized us to the point where we can no longer take care of ourselves like adults.As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the ocean the
implications became far worse than we had individually realized. This is a very
serious situation demanding unequivocal action at every level. We are looking at
consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our
children’s and generations beyond.
People are worried about real things on reddit too -- privacy, foreign policy, etc. More insidious, however, than any quibbles about the new iphone is that people still think these issues are of roughly the same importance. ISIS and species extinction. Neo-Cold War and global warming. In actuality, there is nothing more important than the fact that we are raping the earth. I sit in on discussions and seminars all the time about the state of "x" in 2030-2040-2050... where "x" is the European Union. Or inequality. Or American political efficacy. Or the decline of libraries. Moot points. We can't even imagine what life is going to be like in 2050. There won't be enough food to feed the fucking population we have now. The 99 percent will no longer eat meat. Our ecosystems will be in an irreparable state. Which is why it's hard as fuck to care about the European Union or Capital in the 21st Century or "what social media is doing to Us". Be realistic, world.I post articles about these kinds of things to reddit from time to time. They get maybe 5 to 10 upvotes. Meanwhile people are very concerned about whether their new cellphone has more pixels on the screen than the previous one, or a slight increase in processor speed. Our consumer culture has infantilized us to the point where we can no longer take care of ourselves like adults.
Yes, what you are saying reminds me of what Naomi Klein says in her interview in The Guardian. She thinks environmentalists have given capitalism time to address climate change on its own terms, and capitalism has proven that it is incapable of doing so. So environmentalists need to broaden their challenge: There's a risk of course of alienating supporters of capitalism. But perhaps we have done enough tiptoeing around trying to make an inherently selfish system act unselfishly. The big problem is that everyone has been trained by our current systems to think in an exaggeratedly self-centred way, so that alternatives seem far from reach for each one of us and for society as a whole. It sounds like Naomi Klein is a bit stuck for answers, but I like the way she doesn't give up and won't allow herself to inflict despair on others.“It is not like everything is fine except for the problem that the temperature is going up a little bit,” Klein says. “If the only problem with capitalism was this slight temperature increase, we would really be cooked. But the fact is that there are lots of problems with this system, and on top of all of those problems, it is destabilising our planet’s life support system.”
No, they don't. People tend to live in the moment and hope they are long dead when all the climate change disasters occur.