The climate change agenda is a quite old one and very frequent in today’s news. In latest years with a harsh push and good publicity from Greta Thunberg this agenda is making headlines all over the world all the time. However, looking into the bigger picture of our crucially changing environment, it seems that it is still left in the more or less planning phase, instead of presenting some meaningful milestones.
Many could argue that some real actions already have been taken to reduce the pollution, carbon dioxide emission and the dependency on fossil fuels. However, our response to the climate change with its all consequences doesn’t look sufficient. Looking at it objectively, most of us will agree that all accomplished actions are still smaller steps for implementation of the future grand plan. Already implemented actions are just covering some most visible urgencies that are still more related with humans than with nature itself.
I am not an expert of a climate change agenda and probably not ready to discuss more precisely about exact policies that countries already implemented or which ones we are still missing very much. Nevertheless, even if I’m not a professional of the topic, it does not mean that I cannot discuss, care and act on the issue without any enforced duty. So why the climate change and all uncertainties brought by it to our environment are still far away from our daily lives?
By consulting with few sane and psychologically matured friends, I came up with some most visible shortfalls of the policies, dedicated to fight climate change in our individual daily lives. Debated reason “number one” – the lack of reliable and scientifically approved information. Even if a climate change nowadays is quite often advocated in headlines of the news. It still contains more observant viewpoint rather than reasoned and based on the scientific background approach. Scientific papers on the topic are never promoted and discussed publicly. The message translated from them is simple – climate change is happening and we might be doomed or at least will face harsh consequences in the future. And that’s about it. Most of the time we hear serious threats directed to us and our future generations without any efforts to explain and provide all evidences and maybe controversies of this global change. That lack of reliability keeps many in doubts and disbelieve. The only way to find some real facts about the climate change with clear evidences is to do own comprehensive and time-consuming analysis. Why? If the topic is so important, why our governments and media are not presenting it to us as to adults: with respect, seriousness, facts and models. Moreover, presenting it not once but talking about it and in that manner all the time!
Our discussion group also brought up some doubts related with the clarity of information regarding a waste recycling. We can read and hear quite a lot possible misinformation about waste recycle mess in developed countries. On one side, there are many promotions to sort the garbage for individuals and businesses. However, some controversial information time to time reaches us, how sorting efforts are eventually ignored by recycling companies and all garbage is simply mixed back. Moreover, big mess with recycling of plastic and all other toxic rubbish in the 3rd world simply discourages everyone else around the globe. Efforts in one small society seems to be useless when we consider the big picture of our entire planet.
Additionally, a plastic usage and recycling is one of the most visible topic picked by many politicians and environmentalists. It’s quite clear that the issue is painful and we should act simply now. However, most of the burden is put on final and intermediate users. The fundamental material of the plastic is the oil but still no restrictions and taxes are put on the industry with a goal to discourage the production of unnecessary plastic goods. Governments are still more safeguarding the oil and gas industry than restricting it.
All points made above are related to an information misuse, disproportion and limitation of some actions. I believe they could be investigated and discussed much further and deeper. However, I would like to switch, to my understanding, often forgotten and nevertheless very significant aspects like a personal ignorance of the climate change topic and an emotional perception of the nature.
To my subjective opinion, the nature to most of western people is no longer a part of them but something that is next to them. The rhythm of live became extremely fast and egocentric. That is complicating our capability to notice anything else around us except our self and our well-being. Our acknowledgment of nature mostly is limited by broadcasts on television or YouTube, some walks in the public parks and seldom vacations, incorporating some short visits to beautiful national parks. Regular days mostly pass occupied by work, family, friend, TV-series, books and other activities in the city. This naturally ensued gap between humans and nature is not only distancing us physically from nature but very importantly psychologically as well. The understanding of natural environment became too difficult, too complex and too distanced. It is hard enough to adopt to the city environment, not even talking about the wild.
This kind of relation is building competitive relations between human and the nature instead of a possibility to form an alliance. We are looking into our natural environment as into regular competitor for the well-being in our life. We are trying to explore it in all possible ways just to enrich our materialistic side of a life.
It’s important, additionally to include a significant factor, in relation to our sometimes careless approach to the nature, the lack of compassion first of all to our self and secondly to others around us. Every day we hear constantly promoted self-encouragements and motivation enforcement. Being week or in bad period of the life is something that the society really avoids and tries to reject these kind of members. “You can do this” attitude might be working for humans for some time but not so much for our planet’s fauna and flora. Very often, we forget to sympathize our self in difficult situations, to stop pushing our attitude to the endless extra achievements. We tend to reproach our self when something goes wrong and automatically begin building new plans for the big return back. The lack of experience related with a compassion and understanding for our own life is straight forwarded to others and the environment that we are living in.
This hard to success driven approach is closely related with lower levels of the empathy. According to Sara Konrath, PhD, an associate professor of philanthropic studies at Indiana University and director of the Interdisciplinary Program on Empathy and Altruism Research: “The expectations of trying to get a job with a college degree is really challenging. Rising inequality makes it very hard for average people to have a sustainable lifestyle economically and so on. All of these different pressures on young people, I think crowd out their focus on their own self-care and care for others, because they’re really focused on just trying to be successful and make it. It’s just about more like survival and making it”. Life conditions overwhelmed with success expectations are easily displacing our empathy to other humans and to the nature itself. It’s hard to feel objectives around us when we cannot understand what we feel in a constant state of a survival game.
Big part of social media very actively is pushing the society closer to the environmentally responsible way of living. However, this push is highly demonizing opposite actions and opinions. This situation might lead our unfriendly to nature behavior retreat to our unconscious, where it can act with full capacity without our notice. It becomes a dark shadow of our behavior, fulfilled with ignorance and antagonism to our natural environment. Even though we perfectly know that nature is capable of healing it self quite well, we are simply not leaving it alone.