Our Role in Climate Change
Naomi Klein takes on the topic of climate change in her book This Changes Everything, which has increasingly become a hot button topic in our country’s current political environment due to the current President’s denial of climate change all together. The issue is that he is not alone in his thinking; there are many people in our country and in our world who are uneducated, or simply unaware of the problems we could potentially be causing by polluting our earth and raising the temperature in slow increments. Those who are aware of the issues and still continue to dispute the claims scientists make about climate change do not see the importance of the topic in relation to themselves and our future. Why? I have come to two different conclusions. The first is that the temperature increase is so small that it is essentially unnoticeable to most people and therefore they are left to conclude that without any drastic changes occurring that climate change must not really be that big of a deal. And the second being that some of these people are fully aware of the dire affects human pollution has created for our natural ecosystem but making a drastic change in our lifestyle would result in noticeable profit loss, and since the effects by the end of our lifetime might not be that consequential, who cares right?
“Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance is simply part of being alive in this jarring moment in history, when a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting us in the face — and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place,” (2)
This quote from Klein directly represents the majority picture of our world today and our thoughts about climate change. Instead of our generation facing the issues that past generations and even our own generation has created for itself, negligence is practiced more often than not by a majority of people, and we are ‘doubling down’ as Klein says, because we lack the understanding and desire to make a massive change to our society. This is mainly because people in our country and many different countries around the world have been conditioned to play their parts in society with an inverted focus. We constantly look at what is best and most convenient for ourselves first, and everyone is guilty of this because that’s what our world leaders have deemed the pinnacle of our human experience to be. Work hard and provide for yourself and those that you love at all costs, not telling you that all the work you put in and all the time you sacrificed could be totally pointless because we did such a terrible job taking care of our earth that future generations may not be around to experience the fruits of your labor at all.
Humans are conditioned to seek power over one another. Yet instead of survival of the fittest like it once was in the animal kingdom where the biggest and strongest animals were the most powerful, the power structure we have created gives those with the most capital all of the power. And as long as they hold that power they will not be easily swayed to relinquish that to someone else. I personally believe the desire for man to dominate nature stems from the desire for man to dominate other men. Manipulating and controlling nature has just become the avenue in which these people maintain their control. In our lifetime, this might never change, but eventually, the want and desire to manipulate man and nature will become irrelevant when we are faced with the consequences of our actions.
