Why do We Do The Things We Do?

Why We Do The Things We Do?

Why do we not see climate change as an imminent death threat?

At first, I thought that people’s self-preservation genes may have mutated and we no longer reacted in self-defense to imminent danger. This may be a part of the scenario, but it does not stand alone.

We’ve realized the greatest threat posed by climate change is its absence from mainstream culture. The Vietnam War prompted music, a peace movement, and demands for change. It became a part of the fabric of our society. Climate change has never reached that level of counterculture awareness. The silence on the subject is thundering.

While mostly everyone is ignoring what is happening right before their eyes, The damage our treatment of this planet has caused could be reversible.

Awareness is pivotal to stopping the carnage. Anything non-biodegradable has become our nemesis. We tend to discard with disregard that these items will float in the Pacific Ocean for a hundred years. 

Why is climate change ignored?  Two centuries ago, the world population was 1 billion people. One century ago, the population had grown by 500 million people. Our current population burst into 8 billion people living on Earth at the present time. This size of the population is unsustainable.

In a recent paper published in the journal World, Rees, from the University of British Columbia, warns of a ‘major population ‘correction‘” before the century is out. “Homos sapiens had evolved to reproduce exponentially, expand geographically, and consume all available resources,” Rees writes in the paper. “For most of humanity’s evolutionary history, such expansionist tendencies have been concerned by negative feedback.”

“However, the scientific revolution and the use of fossil fuels reduced many forms of negative feedback, enabling us to realize our full potential for exponential growth,” he said.

Rees points out that our dominance over the planet has made us forget that we are still governed by natural selection. What’s more, our natural inclination towards short-term thinking, which served us exceedingly well in our evolutionary past, continues to compel us to take as much as we can possibly get when it’s available. This has fueled the excessive consumption and pollution we are responsible for. These extremes of population and consumption are predicted to trigger a population correction by the end of this century.

The answer to my question about why we chose to ignore something that could and would kill us is in the sentence “our natural inclination towards short-term thinking.” 

A psychiatrist friend of mine once explained to me that our short-term thinking engages in the occipital part of our brains, closer to our stem part.

A preliminary conclusion of the dilemma of why we don’t act in self-preservation and save ourselves could be biological in nature. Without a correction in this area, natural selection could push the wrong button for us. But is that button the right one for the rest of the planet? We aren’t alone here, even if we like to act as if we are.

(www.newweek.com and www.sciencealert.com)

Thank you for reading.