A Guardian story suggests that we may have as much as eight degrees of global warming already locked in, in the form of stored heat in the ocean. But a substantial stored-heat backlog in the ocean has been well-known for some time. That it is greater than expected is bad news -- but (as I've confirmed in correspondence with Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate) this does not mean that all or most of that stored heat is going to "come back" and fry the planet, provided we take action in time.
I know James Lovelock, the brilliant inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, is spreading the "8 degree" misinterpretation, but most climate scientists do not agree with him.
Climate disruption is a serious crisis for the human race, but the reality is bad enough. No need to make solving it harder by exaggerating the threat. RealClimate has posted a number of articles debunking exaggerated panic-mongering:
- Runaway tipping points of no return
- 11ºC warming, climate crisis in 10 years?
- Climate sensitivity: Plus ça change ...
- Can 2°C warming be avoided?
I don't think anyone will dispute that errors and false statements from any part of the political spectrum or scientific community should be corrected. But I think we have to move beyond that and avoid pushing the panic button in general. (Note that there is plenty to say about global warming that is both frightening and true).
Fear works against us in this fight -- even when fact-based. Yes, it is a powerful emotional force. But fear impels us towards authority and reaction. Politically, it is inward-looking, destructive, narrow, and often xenophobic, moving us either to resist change or seek a mythical past. Positive social change comes from other emotions: hope and joy sometimes, or anger, outrage, and a sense of betrayal in others.
The deniers, the business-as-usual types, are engaged in asymmetrical warfare -- fear is useful for them, not useful for anyone who wants serious positive change.
‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science
Cast your vote for the best climate journalism
The science behind a climate headline
Comments
View as Flat
David Roberts Posted 4:05 am
02 Dec 2006
http://www.grist.org/news/daily/2006/08/29/3/
Check them out. It's something I definitely plan to return to. Glad to find a fellow traveler.
www.grist.org
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JMG Posted 4:51 am
02 Dec 2006
I look and I see strong evidence that fear is an outstanding driver of change (see, for example, the long history of the Cold War, the post-9/11 changes in American society, etc.) One particular instance was the widespread fear of nuclear weapons that flourished in the West during the 1980s, a fear that opposed the fear of the Evil Empire, and one that greatly limited the freedom of action of the Cold Warriors.
Where is the evidence about "positive social change" resulting from "other emotions?" How much change might we expect from how much of these "other emotions?"
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Whiskerfish Posted 5:05 am
02 Dec 2006
If you want to see an interesting example of this, look up Churchill's famous speech to the House Of Commons post-Dunkirk (the famous "We shall fight them on the beaches" speech). Then read the whole thing - not just the last paragraphs. It is an extraordinarily pessimistic, negative speech, and yet it has become one of the defining speeches of the 20th century, and has been credited with turning the British psyche towards victory. Go and explain that, you warm-and-fuzzy types ;)
Whiskerfish
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Bart Anderson Posted 5:31 am
02 Dec 2006
It should also be pointed out that climate forecasting is not Lovelock's speciality. Also, his proposals to deal with climate change are bizarre ("on the side of fission, fusion and synthetic food, against organic farming, environmentalists, solar and wind energy" - Lovelock's Folly (book review)).
The first item of business is to consider whether Lovelock's arguments are sound - to get to the truth of climate change. Then, to develop a public relations strategy (e.g., to consider what messages should be emphasized.)
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
over public relations, because nature cannot be fooled.
- Richard Feynmann
(Report on the Challenger
disaster)
The contemplation of things as they are
without substitution or imposture,
without error or confusion,
is in itself a nobler thing
than a whole harvest of invention.
- Francis Bacon
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sunflower Posted 5:36 am
02 Dec 2006
Feelings of fear and of being helpless cause deep permanent memories, hyper vigilance, anxiety, and can cause PTSD (post traumatic stress syndrome and nightmares). Fear facilitates survival and fear is appropriate for surviving global warming.
It is like a fire-breathing dragon destroying the Earth. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Be not frozen with fear. Do not fear to attack this beast if you get opportunity to do so. Aim for the belly.
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David Roberts Posted 6:26 am
02 Dec 2006
www.grist.org
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Gar Lipow Posted 6:44 am
02 Dec 2006
The whole cold war was based on fear. Fear by the U.S. and Soviet populations allowed both nations to rally popular support for accumulating military power for empire building rather than defense, and nuclear weapons for bullying rather than deterrence (not that I'm a big fan of deterrence theory.)
>One particular instance was the widespread fear of nuclear weapons that flourished in the West during the 1980s, a fear that opposed the fear of the Evil Empire, and one that greatly limited the freedom of action of the Cold Warriors.
Up to a point. Although that we consider the minor limitations we achieved victory shows just how much was achieved by the other side. Again my point is not that fear is unsuccessful in moving people, but that it is asymmetrical and works more for the other side than for us.
>If you want to see an interesting example of this, look up Churchill's famous speech to the House Of Commons post-Dunkirk (the famous "We shall fight them on the beaches" speech). Then read the whole thing - not just the last paragraphs. It is an extraordinarily pessimistic, negative speech, and yet it has become one of the defining speeches of the 20th century, and has been credited with turning the British psyche towards victory. Go and explain that, you warm-and-fuzzy types ;)
Actually you reinforce my point. Fear is wonderful for rallying people around your leaders, around existing authority - not so good for rallying people to rebel to fight for changes opposed by elites. And who you calling warm-and-fuzzy:)
Seriously I'm not opposing negative emotions.I just want to use the ones emotions that have been historically effective in motivating people to rebel against authority. These are not just positive emotions (joy and hope -though you certainly don't want to overlook their power) but anger and sense of betrayal that people in power aren't doing their jobs. Rage is negative emotion that can very effective. Fear - no way in hell. Here are some examples, successful and unsuccessful, violent and non-violent, for good causes and bad.
The American Revolution
Shay's whiskey rebellion
The abolitionist movement
Labor rights pre-WWI
Women's rights pre-WWI
The temperance movement that led to prohibition(hey didn't say that popular movements against authority was always in good causes)
7)The populist and progressive movements
The post WWI labor and civil rights and women's rights momvents
The post McCarthy Era labor, civil rights and women's movements
The Anti-Vietnam war movement
The gay rights movements whose post WWII version began in the fifties, but which really sparked and grew after Stonewall when Lesbians and Gay men got sick of being beaten up by police and fought back - anger, not fear.
The post Vietnam anti-war movement
Let's see what fear based movement we can come up that opposed authority:
The civil war (mixed cause the South also rallied around existing state legislatures, Governors and other authority figures)
The Klu Klux Klan following the civil war
The anti-nuclear war movement of the fifties
A lot (but by no means all of the late sixties early 70's environmental movement
The nuclear freeze movement.
The first generation militia movement
7)The new minutemen movement
Note that many more reactionary movements than progressive ones are fear based - even when you focus just on .
What about fear based movements rallying around authority? Offhand:
Witch hangings
The alien and sedition acts
Population rallying around authority in war of 1812 (as they do in every war) - including WWI, WWII the Mexican American War, the Spanish American War and so on.
The civil war (as I said both rebellious and rallying around existing authorities)
The various red scares
The McCarthy Era
Post 911 support for war and authority
Note that - fear based movements support authority much more often that they support rebellion or change. Fear based movements, when they do support rebellion or social change, support reactionary change more often that they do progressive changes. Of course this sort of thing is a tendency not absolute rule. I included some exceptions. But overwhelmingly the way to bet is that fear works against you; hope and anger work for you if you are trying achieve positive progressive change.
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Zarkov Posted 6:58 am
02 Dec 2006
Panic is the word we should avoid, not fear.
GW is such that it could conceivably bring LIFE on this hunk of rock to its knees, even extinction!
Now that is fearful, and so it should be.
Get with reality and be fearful.
Panic on the other hand is precisely what the establishment is doing,
sitting on its hands in total panic, they are frozen by 'fear', for they know not what to do.
They know not what is actually happening, because to look in the mirror for them would induce utter and total panic. THEY have brought about the extinction of LIFE on Earth.
But do mad people worry, LOL !!!!!!!!!!
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caniscandida Posted 8:16 am
02 Dec 2006
Funny, WhiskerFish, that you should mention Winston Churchill's Dunkirk speech. Synchronicitously, I just happened to be reading an excerpt from it in Niall Ferguson's review of "Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man," by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, in the New York Review of Books of November 30. Ferguson, British-New Yorker, English-kissing but Celtic-loving, quotes the "We shall go on to the end" passage, prefacing it with the remark that it is "still the most moving words I know."
Sho nuff. Fine words they sho are. My own personal 'Mer'kin favorite is, "I never had sex with that woman .. Miss Lewinsky." My my, how this great republic shuddered to its profoundest foundations, because of a curious stain on a dress perversely withheld from the dry-cleaners!
And you know, Bill Clinton would have won re-election in 2000 and in 2004, if only the Constitution had allowed him to run. Probably the only occasion when George W. Bush had a respectful thought for the Constitution.
Back to Niall Ferguson, imperialist apologist: He goes on to point out that for the next two years, the British army was in shambles; their loss of Southeast Asia was disgraceful, their loss of Singapore was horrifying. "Do we deserve this Empire, after all?," thought Churchill; "do we not deserve to have it wrested from us, if we will not stand up and defend it?"
Fear was in the air, and so was refusal to resist, and the will to surrender. The much-mocked French already went through that, when the badly strategized Maginot Line was so easily got around by the Nazis.
Perhaps Zarkov points to a useful distinction: the fear that focusses us, and moves us to discover an escape; and a fear, which Zarkov calls "panic," that incapacitates us.
The fear that led to the early surrenders of French and Brits was apparently of the "panic" kind. The focussing fear, the former kind, which steels one's attention and masters one's reactions, sustained the Brits through the Luftwaffe's attacks.
The background, Biodiv, for "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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JMG Posted 8:19 am
02 Dec 2006
I will concede that fear CAN have a tendency to shut down creativity and openness to new ideas ---but at the same time it creates an intense focus on the perceived threat, including a willingness to see the established order disturbed if necessary to counter the threat and reduce the fear.
Thus, fear could work the way you propose and be anti-survival. But I suggest that it could also be quite pro-survival, assuming that people can be brought to see that the threat to fear, the destruction of global liveability and capacity to support human societies comes from the globalized/ corporatzed infinite growth neolib economic model that they've been sold since birth.
Ultimately, to argue that fear is not pro-survival then you are saying that the last 1 billion years of evolution used the wrong strategy because it will fail this final challenge.
Maybe you're right, but I think that our capacity to destroy the world for the sake of higher GDP and SUV sales is something that should create profound fear, and cause people to be unable to rest comfortably until the threat is reduced.
Survival is optional in all cases. That is, there is no guarantee that humanity will necessarily respond wisely to having its technological prowess outrun its judgment. Even if you are correct that "fear" is a suboptimal strategy, are not your vague alternatives at least as prone to fail in the challenge?
One thing for sure about fear, we are evolutionarily hardwired to respond to it, both our own and that of others--that is partly why the denialists and confusionists and economists are so insistent that environmentalists are overstating the threat (as if an existential threat to human habitability on earth could actually be overstated)... that is, they know that, if fear of global heating takes hold in a sufficient mass of people, the status quo stops ... the pleasure trips to Thailand, the ski vacations in Jackson Hole and Aspen, the humongous SUVs, the six-kid families ... they will all stop dead without any government intervention needed, because people will be shunned as pariahs when they use energy frivolously once the real fear of global heating takes hold.
Yes, it may not be politically correct, and it won't be affirming and nurturant--but it will be effective at responding to the real threat, which is our dogmatic, ingrained belief that it's possible to have ever increasing energy and materials throughput (we call that "growth") in a finite world of finite resources.
People should fear that belief, because it is going to cause immense suffering if it is not overcome.
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Gar Lipow Posted 9:29 am
02 Dec 2006
Again please engage with my actual argument - that fear based politics tends to be either supportive of authority or reactionary (or both). Note that neither one means unsuccessful. Note that supportive of authority does not always mean reactionary. The rallying around Winston Churchill in the UK and Roosevelt in the U.S. were things we should be grateful for.
But for people without power, trying to affect public opinion towards a change in a positive direction - history shows fear has a very low success rate. I gave historical examples. You have not been able to whittle their number down, except by misunderstanding my argument - which I hope is now clear. All you need to counter my list is to provide counter examples where fear:
A) was used by rebel movements not people already in authority
B) and was also used to move things in a progressive direction - to establish something new rather than move backwards towards an earlier state. (For example the South had essentially been ruled by a reign of terror pre-civil war. Opposition to slavery was suppressed by violence. The Klan (and precursor organizations) were not instituting something new; they were partially restoring a previous state of affairs.)
It seems to me that this really is an argument where we need to look at historical examples- not necessarily of successes, but of cases where a substantial movement formed whether it won or lost - based on fear to push something new that the elites of the time opposed.
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willa Posted 10:56 am
02 Dec 2006
I think perhaps we have a dearth of courage in the world these days; certainly that's so in the US. Fear is crippling, producing either defeat or the bad kind of reactionism, only when there's nothing bigger than it in the picture. When the goal is consequential enough to overwhelm the fear, we get movements like the women's rights and civil rights movements; women and black people were certainly afraid of their oppressors, but it mattered enough to them that the fear faded. I think that's what produces strong, angry movements.
So, sure, people should be freakin' terrified of climate change--I keep trying to think how it is that people in Boston can manage to not care about it, given that their fair city is likely to be under a number of feet of water in the relatively near future--but they have to love their land, their way of life, their grandchildren, etc, enough to be angry that something could cause the fearsome effects of climate change.
Of course, my inner pessimist says people are just too sheerly stupid for this to ever work. A very nice lady I know, for instance, is convinced that the war in Iraq is making her safer, and that climate change is not making her less safe. She's the sweetest person you could ever meet, and yet somehow neither the tens of thousands of war dead nor the spectre of millions of climate refugees appears to have entered her mind, ever, at all, and when one tries to fairly and balancedly and non-confrontationally tell her about these things, she announces that it's all too unpleasant and she doesn't want to know because she can't do anything about it anyway. So what exactly is a person to do?
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sunflower Posted 11:10 am
02 Dec 2006
But to the point, I agree with not using fear, nor any other emotion in the politics on global warming. The politics of global warming should be based on reality, the core issue. Fear is just a normal organic reaction, and not adrenalin based, but rather like, "I fear for my trees, I fear for the future of civilization, I fear the government will do nothing."
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Gar Lipow Posted 12:56 pm
02 Dec 2006
mmm - the reality has been pretty well established, with doubt spread only through propaganda with the aid of ignorance. But most polls seem to suggest that a majority of USAians do understand that human caused global warming is a serious danger. (Pew is an outlier in this respect - differing from Gallup, Harris and every respectable polling firm. If anyone has an explanation for the discrepancy, I'd be interested to hear it.) The question is how to reach them, and this does require appeal to emotion.
>women and black people were certainly afraid of their oppressors, but it mattered enough to them that the fear faded.
That is completely different than basing the civil or women's rights movement on fear. Yes, they had to overcome fear; but nobody spent time stirring it up. In the Civil rights movement the spectrum from Martin Luther King to Malcolm X spent very little time talking about how frightening white oppression was. They talked about how evil it was, how unfair it was. They laughed at the absurd illogic behind much of the oppression. As far as I can tell, they spent zero time trying to stir up fear in their supporters. (Malcolm X sometimes tried to stir up fear in his opponents - a different matter.) Similarly I can't remember any leaders of the women's movement encouraging fear among other feminists.
When the first black family moved into an LA neighborhood in the late 1950's, they had a bomb thrown into their yard - which fortunately missed the house. A number of people, black and white (including my late father) took turns guarding their home with shotguns, until word came that danger was past. It was the bomb throwers who started from a position of fear, who based their movement on fear.
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Cennad Posted 8:56 pm
02 Dec 2006
subsequent rant about fear is irrelevant - in fact it is rather like the whole AGW debate, hysterical! Somebody mentioned panic, well hysteria is engendered by panic. Although he has been something of a hero of mine, I believe Lovelock has lost it. I am not knocking his age - I'm seventy so you can call us both gaga if it helps.
Tell me, why should the ocean suddenly render up its heat? Just a thought.
Now before you all groan and say 'denier' let me say that I've been concerned about the climate since the first OPEC spasm jerked me out of my besotted love of the internal combustion engine. I was a motorcyclist at the time and felt suddenly
constrained, didn't like it but at least I started
thinking. Ultimately this led to my family and I
living for twelve years on an island without any
electricity or piped water. I merely state this to indicate my seriousness. To learn more you would have to go to http://cennad.com.
We hear of 'tipping points' - but the true tipping
point is to be found in the mass mind suddenly influenced by the politicians and their henchmen,or one in particular - Stern. Now everybody is an expert with tunnel vision opinions.
Okay, the Earth is warming - as part of a cycle.
Whether AGW is involved or not is moot - I am
personally delighted to side with the AGW lobby if it results in fewer and smaller personal vehicles and cleaner air. Bring on the electric car! Stop crackpot mass migrations of sightseers
crisscrossing the globe potentially spreading disease faster than the birds. (more hysteria).
Stop the use of oil and make our lands more secure.
Enough - I can rant with the best. But just consider, fear is a survival characteristic - fear of the wrong diet can save your heart.
Oh, and with regard to Bates: I used to be a radiographer and we learned very early - there is no safe dose of radiation,
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Whiskerfish Posted 9:13 pm
02 Dec 2006
I do, however, think that people who say we should leave fear, as a generalised concept, out of climate change discussion are jumping the gun, and are talking more from personal belief than from any seriously-considered empirical standpoint.
Those that say we should leave emotion out of the discussion and let the 'facts' speak for themselves (sunflower) have clearly understood absolutely nothing of communication or contemporary cognitive science. Emotion is the key to any effective message - it's figuring out which emotion and how that's the tough part, not whetehr one uses it or not.
Cheers
Whiskerfish (currently pondering a climate-change communication strategy for South Africa)
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sunflower Posted 1:17 am
03 Dec 2006
The US government is fighting the States and other organizations resisting carbon emissions. The US is defending the corporate right to destroy the the human race for greed and corruption. Corporate interests will use the government to stomp on anyone who is effective at causing risk in markets and profits. This is the reason that politics and the emotions of politics will not be effective. Do not try to move the mountain, go around the mountain.
We need a plan to attack the enemy of the human race. Then we need recruits and training for a sustained and difficult war against carbon. Reactionary emotions are not sustainable.
Reactionary emotions need not to be avoided, emotions are honest, just recognize that the problem will remain long after the emotions have burned out.
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JMG Posted 1:25 am
03 Dec 2006
The bottom line about the complex social movements you listed is that the motivations of the participants were as varied as they were, and what we're really talking about when we talk about "the" motivation behind each of them is the overall perspective on those movements, as recorded in the mainstream (sanitized) historical memory channels and, thus, is not really a good indicator of the motivation of individuals.
If fear is so ineffective, I have to wonder why, here in the world's "economic powerhouse," we are daily bathed in advertising that relies, in large or small part, on fear. The so-called "negative ads" that saturate the airwaves in election seasons are universally reviled--and are widely considered to be quite effective by the experts who control the choice of ads.
Consider the way the so-called "liberal media" (terrified of being called "left leaning") responds by constantly letting right-wingers have their way as hosts and reporters, consistently inviting more corporate/ government guests, marginalizing dissenting views etc., and essentially blocking out anything that critiques the "growth at all costs" paradigm.
Perhaps, like the "liberal media" the environmental movement has been effectively neutered by the charges of being "alarmist." We spend so much time worrying about being labeled as "scaremongers" or "doom and gloomers" that we do as much as possible to make our communications arid and anodyne.
The other question I have to ask is this: What if responding to global heating DOES require the rich countries to suffer substantial loss of what we would call today their right to spend their money any way they see fit? What if persuasion proves ineffective in getting rich countries to curb their consumption dramatically to reduce the stresses that they place on the environment?
Aside from fear, the other most powerful motivator I know of--greed--is the one that threatens to destroy the world. Throughout the animal kingdom, it is only fear that is effective at checking greed. Are we so different from all the other animals?
Of course, this is all just handwaving too--but until you provide some actual data that suggests that giving people a clear understanding of the consequences of continuing with business as usual (i.e., scaring the pants off them, as this would be called) deters the appropriate response (demanding policy changes to avert the threats, which will require the end of business as usual) I think your assertion that scaring people works against us is simply that--your assertion.
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:46 am
03 Dec 2006
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Help acquire and protect ecological hotspots, give to a conservation organization: http://www.saveourbiodiversity.com
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David Roberts Posted 3:02 am
03 Dec 2006
Your point about evolution is important. Yes, for millennia, human beings evolved a delicate and sensitive fight-or-flight mechanism. Fear kept us alive. But for most of the time human beings have been on the planet, what we most had to fear was predators and each other -- snakes in the grass, aggressive neighboring tribes, etc. We evolved to react strongly to dangers in our immediate proximity.
But civilization -- a blink of an eye, evolutionarily speaking -- has presented us a whole new set of dangers. They are invisible, incremental, slow-moving, and abstract. They never snarl at us. They do not engage our viscera. Global warming is the paradigm case.
There are two ways environmental advocates could go. We could try to find something that snarls -- that's what all the hype about Hurricane Katrina was. We could try to find human faces for the danger -- that's what the demonization of oil execs is all about. But stimulations of the limbic system call forth, almost by definition, short-term reactions -- lashings out. They engage our need for authority and order, our need for outsiders to hate and attack.
That family of reactions is never going to lead to the kind of shift that will allow us to exist in peaceful equilibrium with the planet.
The more difficult but, IMO, only viable route is to try to engage other, less reptile-brain portions of the human nervous system. Thoughtfulness. Hope. A sense of purpose and nobility. Again, not to self-promote to excess, by my posts on fear and environmentalism contemplated these very questions.
Anyway, I think this is a vital discussion to be having, and I'm happy to see it.
www.grist.org
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amazingdrx Posted 3:11 am
03 Dec 2006
A brand new positive note?
A huge amount of methane, at 20 times the gHG effect of cO2, is now released from wetlands, river and lake sediments due to manure and fertilizer runnoff.
Without it that methane would stay locked up in the submerged cellulosic organic matter.
Running manure, human waste, farm waste, and landfill gas through biodigestors and into fuel cell/turbine power plants that sequester cO2 using algae solar collector systems would stop that huge source of methane GHG.
How much would that slow climate change? Some serious research is needed to determine this. It may offer hope.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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caniscandida Posted 3:25 am
03 Dec 2006
The historical background of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is the frightfully destructive air attacks on London early in World War II, followed by the evacuation of many children from London to houses in the country where they would be taken care of. It is in those circumstances, to such a hospitable country house, that the four Pevensey children, the first set of heroes of C. S. Lewis's wonderful "Narnia Chronicles," were sent, entrusted to the care of an initially mysterious old professor. And it was in a remote room in the professor's house that little Lucy finds the wardrobe.
Queen Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother, sent away her daughters Elizabeth and Margaret to places of relative safety, but she herself and the King remained in Buckingham Palace. When the Palace itself was bombed, she made the famous remark that she could now hold up her head in the very heavily bombed, but lower-class, East End. It was her constant good cheer and active encouragement of the people of London during those dark days which endeared her permanently to her subjects. She was by far the best beloved of the current crop of Royals, deservedly so.
So, it struck me as not impossible that you, an attentive father of young daughters, might at one time or another have read to them "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." That is all.
I very much enjoyed the remarks of Cennad, the ex-radiologist on his island. I shall be sure to mention his remark, that "there is no safe dose of radiation," next time he is X-raying my teeth. And if we let it, that subject might bring us round to the recent weird polonium poisoning in London, and new fears there ...
And, as little as I like seeing our excellent Sunflower slapped, I like what Whiskerfish had to say. But Sunflower's response makes sense too, and suggests that their viewpoints are reconcilable.
To JMG: I love the image of "handwaving," but am not sure I know what it means. Being flutteringly alarmist?
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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willa Posted 7:03 am
03 Dec 2006
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SMLowry Posted 10:29 am
03 Dec 2006
In my years as an activist traveling around speaking at conferences, giving workshops, etc. it was easy to spout facts that engendered fear in some of those who listened. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted people to pay attention to what we're doing to the Earth, whether it be rainforest destruction, clearcutting old growth, the free trade agreements (and so on) which were the issues I worked with back then. I wanted people to be fearful so they would DO SOMETHING. But I learned after a relatively short while (thankfully) that it just didn't work. Either people already knew the litany or they didn't and it paralized them, or, like Willa's nice old lady, they just don't want to hear it because they feel powerless to impact it. And there were always those who just didn't believe.
What I have learned is that people change most readily when they are doing it out of love. For their kids, for their spouse or lover, for their home place, for the Earth. I'm not talking about an intellectual kind of love, I'm talking passion here, I'm talking love that moves one to tears in the right circumstances. That kind of powerful emotion that goes deep can cause people to make even difficult changes. A woman with heart disease doesn't necessarily change her lifestyle for herself, but she will do it for her kids so they don't lose their mom and suffer the pain of her early death. One can love the Earth just as strongly, and when you have kids and also love the Earth there's great motivation.
So maybe one idea would be to present the facts, absolutely, but find a way to do it that incorporates personal stories and experiences that touch the heart. Story is a powerful tool. People like Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme and Deena Metzger, to name a few, talk about the need for a new story that shows the connection and oneness of human beings with the Earth and the Universe and the Cosmos. A new Creation Myth based on real science which is in fact more mysterious and magical than anything we could think to make up, and that connects us through time with our ancestors and the future.
In a practical sense (because I can sense some rolling eyes here), the reality is love in all its forms, from the attraction of molecules one to another that creates matter on through friendship, passion and romantic love, to bliss (which is called other names in different cultures) is the most powerful force in the universe. It creates, it heals, it transcends, and it allows humans to rise to the occasion and do what is needed.
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Whiskerfish Posted 6:08 pm
03 Dec 2006
Cheers
Whiskerfish
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Cennad Posted 6:34 pm
03 Dec 2006
As for a New Philosphy of Unity - that is my particular thing. I've been working on it for at least twenty-five years.
Watch this space.
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caniscandida Posted 7:21 pm
03 Dec 2006
I would add two caveats. First, situations for good story-telling, in which everyone is comfortable, and cared for, and feeling "at home," take some trouble to arrange. Which is fine: once the conditions are in place, truly great things can happen. But those conditions are not likely to be met at, say, a rally at a crossroads, save in the presence of an extraordinarily talented speaker. Such as Bill Clinton. John Edwards? Barack Obama? Maybe.
And secondly, we should not push the term "myth" too soon. I love Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, and think very highly of their creativity. But a contemporary author does not have the authority to apply the word "myth" to a newly created story. We all have to live and die with a story, and perhaps a few generations after us, before a story becomes a "myth."
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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Zarkov Posted 9:09 pm
03 Dec 2006
I have proposed a world wide experiment that kids can perform
see omegafour.com
The results should expose the real threat, found by their own hands
>> we need is pro or anti-authority
We need power, we need all the people to know what is going on, then we can work with the authorities
>> people without power
This experiment on relative water evaporation rates will give the kids mainly and then the people power.
I ask all readers to pass this message onwards and outwards. We still can make a difference.
:)
>> talk about the need for a new story that shows the connection and oneness of human beings with the Earth and the Universe and the Cosmos. A new Creation Myth based on real science which is in fact more mysterious and magical than anything we could think to make up, and that connects us through time with our ancestors and the future. >>>
I am up to it. I believe all that is alive is just one super-organism, I call LIFE. I am a Stoic and a scientist.
If anyone would like to write a book with me, online, then great.
Do it.
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caniscandida Posted 10:51 pm
03 Dec 2006
Or rather, we need the power that comes from the Stoicism of Crazy Horse: "This is a good day on which to die."
("And God looked back on all that he had done that day, and said that it was good.")
That is, the power that we need is the power to help us cope with our inevitable limitedness, to help us cope with necessity.
And, of course, the great sin of America is the denial of necessity.
On Stoicism in literature: It is up to each of us, to decide on how to evaluate that Stoic classic, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. He of course was the great Stoic emperor, and a character in the popular movie "Gladiator," played by the late great Richard Harris, aka Dumbledore, who got snuffed out early on -- which was perhaps good for Russell Crowe, on balance, in the long run. To say nothing of what might have been good for Rome. Though not certainly.
Before "Gladiator," Marcus Aurelius had already allowed himself to be poisoned by a blind apple-cutter in the 1960s epic, "The Fall of the Roman Empire," with Alec Guinness, "genuine class," in the role.
And, literarily, Marcus Aurelius had an interesting but hardly heart-warming cameo appearance in that Victorian oddity, Walter Paton's "Marius the Epicurean."
Then, even more briefly, he sticks his nose into the recent, celebrated "A God Strolling in the Cool of the Evening," by the Portuguese novelist Mario de Carvalho.
So: the offer of collaborating with a "Stoic" intrigues me. But I am more of an Academician, with however a most un-Platonic and Aristotelianoid love of mythology and story-telling, as well as certain other Epicurean, Jewish, Christian, Gnostic affections. So the collaboration does not look promising.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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JMG Posted 12:39 am
04 Dec 2006
Here's the link to the article
http://www.biology.ualberta.ca/courses/biol468/uploads/w0...
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JMG Posted 12:45 am
04 Dec 2006
Please operationalize these concepts for us. Please tell us what specific behaviors you are calling for, and point to any examples where they are being used effectively at anything like the scale of the problem and can be copied.
Meanwhile, I notice that, while environmentalists have slowly formed a consensus that something ought to be done, global greenhouse gas emissions are not only going up, they are increasing at an increasing rate ...
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Gar Lipow Posted 1:07 am
04 Dec 2006
Not relying primarily on fear does not equal using only postive emotions.
You note the failure of the environmental movement on this issue (and I would add a lot of others too). It is not as though environmentalist have neglected to use fear on both this and other issues. Fear based tactics worked on this issue for a very short time (in a context when there were lots of other progressive changes taking place mostly pushed by non-fear based movements.) So fear is a tactic that has been used, and does not seem to be working.
Again - historically most progressive rebel movements, movements which sought to make the world better against the wishes of those in authority have NOT gained supporters by seek to make those whose support they sought afraid. And this is not confined to the Ghandi's. John Brown may have sought to terrify slave owners. He did not seek to terrify slaves or abolitionists. (And not I'm not advocating we use John Brown's tactics - just rebutting the slander that opposition to trying to terrify your supporters neccesarily implies a warm and fuzzy or politically correct approach.)
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Gar Lipow Posted 1:43 am
04 Dec 2006
THE EVOLUTIONARY ROOTS OF OUR ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS: TOWARD A DARWINIAN ECOLOGY
I have no great confidence in the insights of evolutionary biology here - it is a branch of science that has been more contaminated with ideology than most. If it is finally been put on a really scientific bases, well that is a good thing. However, for whatever it is worth, he seems to be to suggest that in dealing with global warming and similar fundamental environmental issues, the strong points of our argument will be a combination of appeal to short term self interest, and appeal to status seeking as "more responsible stewards than thou". Not exactly warm and fuzzy, but not fear based either.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:22 am
04 Dec 2006
A science writer who thinks evolution theory is political? Yikes!
We got trouble, trouble with a capital "T". Right here in River city..er..gristmill. Hehehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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atreyger Posted 2:32 am
04 Dec 2006
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JMG Posted 5:33 am
04 Dec 2006
Not relying primarily on fear does not equal using only postive emotions.
You note the failure of the environmental movement on this issue (and I would add a lot of others too). It is not as though environmentalist have neglected to use fear on both this and other issues. Fear based tactics worked on this issue for a very short time (in a context when there were lots of other progressive changes taking place mostly pushed by non-fear based movements.) So fear is a tactic that has been used, and does not seem to be working.
=====
OK, let me ask again:
Please operationalize these concepts for us. Please tell us what specific behaviors you are calling for, and point to any examples where they are being used effectively at anything like the scale of the problem and can be copied.
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Gar Lipow Posted 7:58 am
04 Dec 2006
I don't have great faith in evolutionary social psychology. It used to be heavily contaminated with social darwinism (which has little to do with Darwins actual theory). Dustin Penn acknowledge this right in his paper, and says it is being done more scientifically in recent decades. I'll admit Pinker (who is also in th that field) has always impressed me as being a scientist rather than a propandist. - Wow! that was one heck of a typo or brain burp or whatever.
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SMLowry Posted 9:46 am
04 Dec 2006
There are some incredibly powerful speakers who can share stories with a crowd and communicate its essense, but you're right, it takes the right place, the right ambiance . . . but when it happens, and I've experienced it many times, it's just magic and suddenly (it seems) people get it. They feel it somehow and often the feeling triggers a memory of their own. The thing is, once you feel it, to bring that feeling to life often, nourish the love so it's present in you life every day. I believe it makes a difference somehow. Right now as I type these words, for instance, I just happened to look up and out of the casement window in my office and there is the very-nearly full moon just slipping out from behind a cloud. A reminder, for sure and so perfectly beautiful.
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Zarkov Posted 7:15 pm
04 Dec 2006
Oh yes, Darwin's theory is very political
"and the sins of thy father shall be upon you"""
so sayeth the policeman......
Evolution theory is a disaster, the theory is where we are all (supposedly) responsible for our karma because of mutations uncontrolled.
LOL
as if
We must make mistakes to learn to go forward... are these punishable by death ?
So we have "evil" and "good" and " evolutionary disadvantage" and "evolutionary advantage"
LOL, you have to FALL FOUL OF ONE OF THEM SOMETIME
no, this is not right, if we are here, alive, therefore we are meant to be here and we should be all welcome at the table of LIFE.
Religious theory and Darwinian evolutionary theory have split brother against brother.
WHY ???????????
because the modern mind (it all changed in Socrates' time and onward) has turned to fantasy and turned away from reality... the reality never changes as many primitive societies a long time ago knew, all LIFE is one organism.
An environmental movement must have an environmental philosophy, and religion and theory are not useful.
It comes from the heart of a Stoic
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Delay And Deny Posted 1:39 am
05 Dec 2006
I can't wait for Kent, WA to start warming up. I intend to enjoy 70 degree winters and 95 degree summers to the max.
Right now, I'm researching buying land in central Canada.
You Read It Here First
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services.
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amazingdrx Posted 2:23 am
05 Dec 2006
I will get back to you with info on how factories are already being timed to power loads and saving big money on energy to do so.
Mostly automated plant that feed broken glass or aluminum cans (for instance) into a system that recycles them using excess solar or wind power and then runs grid generation off of the stored waste heat. that is what I envision. Not stopping assembley lines when the wind blows.
Our local landfill has space for wind machines and piles of glass they could be autofeeding right now in fact. That way wind power that the grid could not accept would be stored in the recycllerd materials, replacing other sources of energy used for recycling.
The same for distillation, solar heats up a heat storage media like salt or molten glass, then that heats the liquid 24/7. Then a heat pump run off a wind machine increases the efficiency when the wind blows. This is not rocket science, but it does take imagination and keeping right on top of the latest renewable energy techology.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Whiskerfish Posted 3:29 am
05 Dec 2006
I am continually astonished by the assumptions made by famous conservation scientists around how things should be communicated - that is if they think of this at all. There is still a prevalent view that we are all idealised 'Homo oeconomicuses' motivated purely by financial self-interest and fear of death, which just isn't true.
Whiskerfish
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amazingdrx Posted 1:44 am
06 Dec 2006
Fuel cell/microturbine backupped electric cars as backup grid generation.
100 million 20kw generation cars plugged into the grid and connected to biogas or natural gas or powdered cellulose or even pulverized coal sources could generate over 3 times our present electric power generation of 600,000 mw.
With 3 to 5 times present efficiency and elimination of almost all cO2 emmissions.
And that is neglecting the huge storage capacity of these vehicles which would give a day or so of renewable energy backup without even firing up the fuel cells, that take about 15 minutes to heat up and go online.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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