Weekend Open Thread: Too Late to Prevent Disaster, But Not Too Late to Limit It.

A big hat tip to the Chicano Latino Immigrant Democratic Club of Orange County, who brought the piece highlighted here to the attention to a large private Democratic blog that I’m not sure I’m allowed to name. (Ask Vern.)

My dissertation, 31 years ago, analyzed how people (college students, in this case) responded to collective threats. This was at a time when the focus in the clinical and social psychological field of “coping” was virtually all on individual threats, so I had to blaze my own trail. I discussed how collective threats were much more complicated than individual threats for a plethora of reasons. I also did experimental research on what coping mechanisms people used to cope with such threats — I had written about the threat of nuclear war in some earlier research, but all but a few people could have so virtually no influence on strategic military strategy, I changed to studying the issue of water pollution — which had both a collective and individual component. (This was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a couple of hours away from Flint, a city not yet famous for poisoning its residents.) The main finding of my dissertation was that students, even ones who recognized the growing significance of the problem, were not much moved to join a new student group addressing such issues — but the important question was why they weren’t. I addressed most of the relevant, standard Freudian defense mechanisms addressed in the field — denial, suppression, rationalization, deferral — and I found that only one of them was a relied upon to a really significant degree by people who recognized the threat: not deferral of the threat for other people to solve, but deferral of the threat in time, based on the implicit presumption that if things really got bad, someone would do something about it.

As I noted in my 1991 work, this was not a good coping strategy, but if was effective because — unlike denial of the existence of an actual problem — it could not be falsified at the moment in which the person utilized it. And, in the decades since, that perception has been borne out in areas far more significant than water pollution itself: specifically, a rapidly heating climate.

(As an aside: I’m not much of a fan of the term “climate change,” which seems emotionally pallid, and leaves oneself open to the counter that “well, over history, the climate has always been changing!” Yeah, there have been swings in climate over centuries. But rarely have them come this fast, with records breaking overwhelmingly in a single direction, often repeatedly over the course of a single decade. To use an analogy: an adult’s weight often fluctuates, but when every month one loses or gains more weight — year after year, in the same direction, without giving any sign of slowing down — then it’s time to recognize that one is heading for disaster. And yes — thanks for asking, as I know that it is a ripe topic for anonymous commentary — my own weight has been pretty stable for years, except for my losing 20 pounds in the first six months of Covid.)

The author, Kai Heron, makes the point that we need to stop talking about “how many years we have left” to avoid the most serious consequences of climate change. Those “most serious consequences” are note simply already here to a significant degree, but already inevitable to a large degree. The main question is how much damage will be caused to our species, to other species, and to the environments where they live. And it has never been about “saving the planet” — Earth will be fine, as fine as Venus is. But Gaia — Earth as a harbor of life — may be gutted except for

Here’s his short text thread in full:

This seems like a really good point, and I hope you share it — with attribution you insert or by sharing this post — with others. It’s a really useful corrective to the impulse to defer the need to act against this cataclysmic threat in time.

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This is your Weekend Open Thread. We may add some more items of interest below that poor representation of waters being interrupted by fire. Talk about whatever you want within bounds of dignity and decorum — which means exclusion of the topic that has recently been roiling this blog. (If you can’t play fair, you can’t play at all.)