With climate scientists producing increasingly dour predictions re: the impending doom, Ken Ward of Gristmill.org believes the reason we’re not doing anything different is because we’re suffering from a form of dementia …
In our hearts we know that what we are doing is futile, but we do not know what else we should or could be doing. The constraints within which we work feel so intractable and out of human scale that we cannot imagine how to break them. Despite our best efforts, Americans just don’t seem to get it or they don’t care, and we are at a loss to explain this. Unable to influence our own nation, we are further dismayed by the far vaster challenge of altering the trajectory of China, India, Brazil, and the rest of the world.
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So how and why do we keep showing up to work every day with barely a ripple of disaffection? How can we have arrived a year or so away from a last chance to stave of cataclysm with no clue what to do and not be going nuts?
One of the most important things you can do to stop climate change is stop eating animal products or, if you really can’t, SERIOUSLY cut back on your consumption of these products.
This is the biggest personal decision you can make to try to stop our environmental catastrophe.
A solid policy that, for health reasons as well as those you mentioned.
However, if the only options we’re left with are various individual voluntary actions, what chance is there at averting an environmental collapse?
That was what I took from the article at least.
I see what you are saying, but what I took from the article is that the “cognitive dissonance” is really between what we know we should be doing as individuals, and what we actually are doing.
I believe that the change does need to happen at the ground roots – individual people taking responsibility for their actions. The problem seems so big that people look to Obama and the government to solve it (and sure, a heck of a lot of investment in alternative fuel technologies is definitely needed) but I think that this does nothing to empower people to change their lifestyle.
The fact is, there are things about our lifestyles that are destroying our environment that we can change. While we can’t always immediately change the way our physical landscape is largely set up to accommodate cars, not bikes or people, and while we can’t immediately change where our electricity comes from, you CAN immediately change in one single decision what you eat.
This decision is a big one. Livestock contributes 18% of greenhouse gas CO2 emissions as well as leads to deforestation and waste of water (8% of human water use goes to livestock). It’s more efficient to eat vegetables themselves than go through the whole process of feeding them to animals.
So I would say that individual action is critical to stopping climate change. Radical action, not just buying cloth shopping bags and organic shampoo and recycled yoga mats and stuff. In fact, if being “green” is just making you buy still more accessories to replace your “non-green” ones, forget it!
Sorry to sound preachy but I was inspired by this part of the article: “we scrupulously avoid criticizing each other, lacking conviction in our own courses of action and not wishing to invite criticism in turn”
I am in agreement with Meghan (no surprise, I guess, since we live
together…) that individuals informing individuals is going to be at
the base of this thing. It’s much easier to write off the moral base
a large organization (i.e. – PETA) than a friend.
After posting a comment on facebook about omnivores and
waste/consumption (not directed to anyone in particular), I was amazed
to find that it was the tipping point for one of my neighbors to turn
to a vegetarian diet. I entered my own vegetarianism, and more
recently veganism, through similar experiences.
That said, I do wonder if we should start giving more attention on the
HIMC (maybe I’m volunteering myself for this) to “green-collar” work
going on around the local area (CT as well as wider New England
issues). I got chills of Buckminster Fuller upon reading this late
last year: http://ecoworldly.com/2008/08/15/canadas-bay-of-fundy-beautiful-and-renewable-power/.
You can put PV solar panels on your roof for a lot less than you think. Come find out more at Hartfords West End Community Center March 30th at 7pm. Generate your own electricity and sell back to the utility. Lease the panels and own the electricity they generate. And it puts local people to work. Green jobs in action. Change is happening right here in CT.
The PV solar information session is actually Tuesday March 31 at 7pm at the West End community Center, 571 Farmington Ave, Hartford