Kevin Drum expresses frustration that people just don’t get how hard it will be to even start fighting climate change – and our own natures:
Human beings aren’t wired to [make the changes necessary to reduce climate change]. You aren’t doing it. I’m not doing it. Europeans aren’t doing it. No one is doing it. We’re willing to make modest changes here and there, but dramatic changes? The kind that seriously bite into our incomes and our way of life? Nope.
When I mention this to people, a common reaction is disbelief. You really think people will let the planet burn before they’ll give up their cars? That’s exactly what I think, because it’s happened many times before. Over and over, human civilizations have destroyed their environments because no one was willing to give up their piece of it. They knew exactly what they were doing but still couldn’t stop. They have overfished, overgrazed, overhunted, overmined, and overpolluted. They have literally destroyed their own lifeblood rather than make even modest changes to their lifestyles.
Anybody who’s interested in constructing a realistic plan to fight climate change has to accept this. It’s the the single biggest obstacle in our way, and it can’t be wished away or talked away. As frustrating as it is, it has to be addressed on its own terms. Anyone not willing to do this simply because they don’t like it needs a very deep gut check about what they really think is important.
To amplify, this is the evolutionary drive humans, as well as most live entities, are burdened with: the drive to increase our numbers. Historically, one group could overwhelm another through sheer numbers; nowadays, technology enables weapons that lessens that advantage, but evolution drives us on.
In addition, we’re seeing what economists call the tragedy of the commons, and it’s the greatest commons of all – the biosphere. We’re savagely using it for our individual and group purposes, unable to conceptualize the idea that the world as a whole is so overpopulated that the biosphere itself is affected on a global scale.
But we cannot directly perceive it, so it lacks urgency; and, meanwhile, the evolutionary drumbeat goes on: the other groups are growing bigger, we must too!
Population biologists often talk about how different species populations change through time in response to predator or prey populations, and I’m sure they also study how subgroups within certain species also see their populations vary through time in relation to each others’ aggressions and misfortunes.
If we cannot find our way out of this conundrum, humanity’s going to see a drop in population that will be very unpleasant.
