Society is not simply an aggregate of millions or billions of individual choices but a complex, recursive dynamic in which choices are made within institutions and ideologies that change over time as these choices feed back into the structures that frame what we consider possible. The main problem with this proposal isn’t with the ideas of teaching thrift, flying less or going vegetarian, which are all well and good, but rather with the social model such recommendations rely on: the idea that we can save the world through individual consumer choices. But when values taught in the classroom don’t match the values in the rest of society, the classroom rarely wins. On its face, this proposal might seem sensible. Wynes and Nicholas argue for teaching these values in high school, thus transforming society through education. Take the widely cited 2017 research letter by the geographer Seth Wynes and the environmental scientist Kimberly Nicholas, which argues that the most effective steps any of us can take to decrease carbon emissions are to eat a plant-based diet, avoid flying, live car free and have one fewer child - the last having the most significant impact by far. The middle and later decades of the 21st century - my daughter’s adult life - promise a global catastrophe whose full implications any reasonable person must turn away from in horror. My daughter was born there.īarring a miracle, the next 20 years are going to see increasingly chaotic systemic transformation in global climate patterns, unpredictable biological adaptation and a wild spectrum of human political and economic responses, including scapegoating and war. There’s a time lag between carbon dioxide increase and subsequent effects, between the wind we sow and the whirlwind we reap. ![]() The very idea of unified national political action toward a single goal seems farcical, and unified action on a global scale mere whimsy.Īnd even if world leaders somehow got their act together, significant and dangerous levels of warming are still inevitable, baked into the system from all the carbon dioxide that has already been dumped. It would demand centralized control of key economic sectors, enormous state investment in carbon capture and sequestration and global coordination on a scale never before seen, at the very time when the political and economic structures that held the capitalist world order together under American leadership after World War II are breaking apart. To stop emitting waste carbon completely within the next five or 10 years, we would need to radically reorient almost all human economic and social production, a task that’s scarcely imaginable, much less feasible. And anyone who pays much attention to politics can assume we’re almost certainly going to botch it. It’s not unreasonable to say that the challenge we face today is the greatest the human species has ever confronted. My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our daughter to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way to shield her from the future.Īnyone who pays much attention to climate change knows the outlook is grim. ![]() A world of extinction and catastrophe, a world in which harmony with nature had long been foreclosed. First for joy, when after 27 hours of labor the little feral being we’d made came yowling into the world, and the second for sorrow, holding the earth’s newest human and looking out the window with her at the rows of cars in the hospital parking lot, the strip mall across the street, the box stores and drive-throughs and drainage ditches and asphalt and waste fields that had once been oak groves. I cried two times when my daughter was born.
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