The problem with humans
If you had to narrow it down, the problem with human beings is this: we are notoriously short-sighted in our thinking. We just can't think in large enough spans of time. Ask us to think about any given concept over the span of oh, say, 50 years from now is a stretch. 100 is really asking a lot. 500? Forget it. At the same time our technological know-how has sky-rocketed so now we can do things, design things, build things, implement things --BIG things-- that certainly have those sorts of life-spans with the potential to still be affecting the world far off in the future. A friend of mine adds, "we can also break things, move things, change things on a big/long scale. Mountaintops. Underwater background noise. The ozone layer. Bazillions of barrels of oil."
And nuclear waste. Know what the half life of uranium 235 (the stuff in spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors) is? 704 million years. Here's a good fact sheet on it from the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. Know how many nuclear reactors the world has? Over 400 in operation.
What do we going to do with all this stuff? According to Environment Canada, “true walkaway disposal methods are unlikely to be possible, given the long time periods (a minimum of 250,000 years) for which the longer-lived radionuclides would have to be isolated from the soil, air, and water." Source: Canada vs. the OECD: An Environmental Comparison. Lord, have mercy!
All this I've said before. But another aspect of it struck me the other day. George Lakoff --you know that guy who's so good at explaining the differences in how liberals and conservatives think and wrote that book, Don't think of an Elephant-- recently wrote a guest post on 538.com. It's a great post, you should go read the whole thing; he's talking about "seven crucial intellectual moves that [he] believe[s] are historically, practically, and cognitively appropriate, as well as politically astute" but for now check out #6: systemic causation and systemic risk. He says:
They don't think about systemic causes (if they did, they'd be called "liberals") but what are the two most pressing problems facing our generation right now? The global economic meltdown and global warming! These things are systemic. You can't think of them as a product of any one process; by their very nature they are systemic problems. Lakoff says this causes some serious conundrums for conservatives but there's also this: what if --just what if-- having to deal with these two huge, systemic problems gets us humans to finally start thinking about the consequences of our actions in a larger time frame? What if these two crises fundamentally change the way we think? Wow! How cool would that be? That is, if we survive.











Recent Comments