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People hate dealing with change. Alvin Toffler’s 1971 Future Shock outlined humanity’s failure to adapt. Does it still apply in a world where even the climate is changing?
Sophie Cunningham asks how we as a society and as individuals perceive – and sometimes deny – change.
She questions what makes humans dangerously reluctant to acknowledge a crisis, and what the potential consequences of our failure to adapt may be. And she explores how we might regain a grip on agency in the face of confronting truths.
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You've fingered climate change deniers. I disagree. If 70-odd percent were convinced at some stage then they are not likely to easily becoming deniers. Ask rather why GW Bush was voted in for a second term, why the global financial crisis happened, why the US took so long to engage in WW2 etc. etc. etc.
Humanity has a great deal of both inertia and momentum. Extinctions are due to habitat loss and over use of resource (e.g. fishing). Not climate change yet. Where have threats been responded to with alacrity? The threat of AIDS was perhaps one. It was a vastly simpler problem than climate change.
To a large extent it's politics - the art of the possible. The world eventually got together on the Balkans conflict. And Libya, because it was obviously winnable. What about Syria? Not winnable without significant cost.
Climate change amelioration is vastly more complex than anything humanity has had to face. We don't have a world government and won't for at least a century in any effective way. So the solutions must be technological, and will only be developed by the technologically capable. Imposing national level carbon pricing is a way to encourage technological development.
It is not fear that paralyzes us. It is inertia and momentum. Perhaps your subconscious identified it. It is western democracy. It is fatness, and an unwillingness to get thin.
dave clancy
26 February at 10:34AM