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Alex Steffen @ WorldChanging comments on 2006 as the media's "climate change tipping point" year:
www.worldchanging.com/archive...297.html
With an increasingly well-documented and articulated global ecological crisis on our hands, turning off the faucet and recycling the newspaper (while fine things to do) are pretty meaningless. The 21st Century does demand that we buy hybrids -- indeed, it demands much more: it demands that we imagine, build and buy cars which ecologically make hybrids look like hummers. It demands a complete redesign of our industrial civilization, from the chemicals we use to the energy we create to the cities we design to the way we deal with water and waste to the buildings in which we live. We are way, way beyond tinkering at the margins here.
So how is it that, in the very same issue which describes Manhattan disappearing beneath the rising waters of a warming world, we also find comments like Halberstadt's?
I think it has to do with vision. Even those of us who get it (who recognize that our civilization is impelled to change itself utterly or be utterly changed by forces beyond our control), and who believe that we can create instead a bright, green future (one which is both more prosperous and far more sustainable than our own) have a damn hard time telling people what such a future will look like. We can't build what we can't imagine, but very, very little good work is being done on imagining and portraying a future exciting and inspiring enough to fight for.
In the absence of such visions, the necessary magnitude of changes to our status quo are simply unimaginable to most people. And if those changes are unimaginable, then can we really fault people (like Ms. Halberstadt, who I've really been unfairly picking on) who still honestly believe that little things will somehow add up to the kind of response we need? I don't think we can. The fault is not theirs, if they have never been shown a better way. We have work to do, I think.
www.worldchanging.com/archive...297.html
www.worldchanging.com/archive...297.html
With an increasingly well-documented and articulated global ecological crisis on our hands, turning off the faucet and recycling the newspaper (while fine things to do) are pretty meaningless. The 21st Century does demand that we buy hybrids -- indeed, it demands much more: it demands that we imagine, build and buy cars which ecologically make hybrids look like hummers. It demands a complete redesign of our industrial civilization, from the chemicals we use to the energy we create to the cities we design to the way we deal with water and waste to the buildings in which we live. We are way, way beyond tinkering at the margins here.
So how is it that, in the very same issue which describes Manhattan disappearing beneath the rising waters of a warming world, we also find comments like Halberstadt's?
I think it has to do with vision. Even those of us who get it (who recognize that our civilization is impelled to change itself utterly or be utterly changed by forces beyond our control), and who believe that we can create instead a bright, green future (one which is both more prosperous and far more sustainable than our own) have a damn hard time telling people what such a future will look like. We can't build what we can't imagine, but very, very little good work is being done on imagining and portraying a future exciting and inspiring enough to fight for.
In the absence of such visions, the necessary magnitude of changes to our status quo are simply unimaginable to most people. And if those changes are unimaginable, then can we really fault people (like Ms. Halberstadt, who I've really been unfairly picking on) who still honestly believe that little things will somehow add up to the kind of response we need? I don't think we can. The fault is not theirs, if they have never been shown a better way. We have work to do, I think.
www.worldchanging.com/archive...297.html
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