Law professor and environmental activist, Gus Speth, hit the nail on the head when he observed that science cannot solve climate change that threatens life on Earth.
“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
Which leads me to an essay from Greater Good Magazine, "Why the world needs an empathy revolution." It may be a long overdue antidote to the selfishness, greed and apathy that Speth warns may bring us low on the climate front.
5 comments:
Empathy? Walking a mile in another man's moccasins? Who does that any more?
Apparently not nearly enough, Owen. I think Speth's message is that we need to change ourselves before we can deal with climate change and I think he's right.
We are a culture that has become mired in selfishness, greed and apathy. Everything is about us, here and now, not the other guy. That is what I find so infuriating in these petro-pimps. Fossil energy greenhouse gas emissions are already killing people in what are, to us, distant lands, yet they never enter into our angry debates about flooding world markets with bargain basement bitumen.
We like to think of ourselves as a highly principled society and yet every day we demonstrate our hypocrisy.
Greed and apathy on the one side. Crazy, vicious, merciless fanaticism on the other.
"The world needs an empathy revolution" is an absurd platitude. It just says, "we are the good people" – who consequently never do anything. And they are the EVIL, RACIST BIGOTS!
It's a pathetic figleaf of fake virtue. And the sleaziest of political rhetoric.
Don't look over here at our Big Liberal Cities segregated like Apartheid South Africa, where the glass ceiling is so low for People of Color they have to crouch down beneath it.
No, look over there at those racist hillbilles. THEY are the root of all evil.
Time to get Medieval on their asses. Break out the Scarlet R's and concentration camps and society will soon be purified of this unspeakable evil, forever!
Bigots of the world unite against bigotry! Haters of the world hate until your heart's content: stamp out hatred! Never again! – as they bring it all back again.
Bringing back Akhenaten. Bringing back Constantine. Bring back Charlemagne. Bringing back Napoleon. Bringing back Stalin. Bringing back Hitler. Bringing back Pinochet. Bringing back cultural totalitarianism. Bringing back savage and Orwellian Medieval morality. Let's sing hymns to the gods we made while burning the evil-doers to death.
The revolution will not be televised. It is a revolution of the mind.
What a load of drivel, Anon. Brevity, it seems, has no currency with you even when you're prattling on.
I would consider boiling down 3500 years of rotten history to a few paragraphs to be an act of brevity!
The Lord Jesus says, "You will know them by what they do." The savage, moralist fanatic can be known by their utter lack of mercy.
You neoliberal weasels don't know what you're getting yourselves into with your little covenant with the High Born. The Beast will kill us all this time around! Repent from your corruption, before it is too late!
Viva la revolution! (Of the mind. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you!)
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