It was once argued
that we have “stone age emotions, medieval institutions and god-like
technology” and the continued allowance of a behaviour that allows climate
change to expand unabated confirms that.
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B.F. Skinner was
prescient in his
thinking. |
Beyond that fundamental inadequacy, human intelligence is
questionable for we know broadly where we are going, but we are unable to
change our behaviours with sufficient haste to slow, or stop, the damage we are
causing to earth’s atmosphere.
Unbridle climate change has the capacity to end human life
on earth, well in not end humanity’s reign at the top of the food chain, reduce
it to a few cowering pockets of humanity eking our life in a precarious way,
putting mankind among earth’s threatened species.
Writing in his 1971 book “Beyond Freedom and Dignity”, the
late American psychologist, behaviourist, inventor and social philosopher, B.F
Skinner, discussed our inability to position human understanding and technology
in our lives.
He wrote that where human behaviour begins, technology stops
and that we must carry on as we have in the past, with what we have learned
from personal experience, or from those collections of personal experiences
called “history”, or with the distillations of experience to be found in folk
wisdom or practical rules of thumb.
“These have been available for centuries, and all we have to
show for them it the state of the world today,” he wrote.
Skinner wrote that 2500 years ago it might have been said
that man understood himself as well as any other part of his world, but
“Today”, he wrote, “he is the thing he understands least.”
He was writing long before science understood the existence
and causes of climate change, but his was prescient understanding why it is a
dilemma to which we are unequal.
Skinner, who died in 1990, would have been dismayed (in
truth probably not) that we continue to discount the importance of the
environment, sacrificing it without apparent care or concern to ensure
short-term gains are realised with little or no concern for or about our intergenerational
responsibilities.
Religious practices may or may not appeal to you, but within
them is a behaviour that could rescue humanity from itself.
Author John S. Schumacher, writing in “The Age of Insanity:
Modernity and Mental Health”, encouraged his readers to consider the life of
the Amish people whose lives are simple and yet loaded with rich tradition;
tradition s that are contrary “to a worrying consensus of stupidity that is
contributing to a number of contemporary and emotional ills”.
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| Emile Durkheim. |
It was the late Emile Durkheim who said that Western culture
had become a disorganized dust of individuals who have been freed from all
genuine social bonds.
Should we fail to acknowledge and do something about climate
change, then dust we will be.
Lord Rees has appealed for research into geo-engineering technologies
in case efforts to curb carbon emissions fail and considering the result of the
September 7 Federal Elections in Australia that saw the election of a
conservative government that about to cut a swathe through the country’s
environmental controls, giving runaway climate change a leg-up.
Geo-engineering is loaded with risk and through unintended
consequences could bring more trouble upon us, than climate change itself.
However, should whatever is implemented work, then it does
naught except allow us to continue to plunder the earth’s resources and through
that ensure the sustenance of a world structure that favours just a few and
disadvantages billions.
