To echo this article's sentiment I have always really disliked the anthropomorphization of the natural world. I think a lot of people think that it's a politically effective tactic, but I think the opposite is true. Getting human beings to even look at each other as being equally worthy of dignity and respect is already a tall order.
Human beings spend a lot more time perceiving the social structures they are in (even when they're not aware that they are doing so) than they do reacting to "objective" reality or nature. A lot of people in the world see themselves as being cast aside or outside the current dominant social structures. Convincing them to make sacrifices for the future when the present already seems irredeemably shitty is a losing political argument. Casting nature as yet another political constituency that they need to pay deference too is foolish.
Messages of hope are the only ones that will work to build consensus (even if hope seems irrational at this point).
Edit:
Personally, I think the only rational message of hope right now is that we should be ploughing as much money into science and technology as we can. We certainly shouldn't take our eye off the ball for dealing with climate change, but it seems obvious that we're going to need some pretty amazing technological breakthroughs if we're going to survive as a species.
Messages of hope are the only ones that will work to build consensus (even if hope seems irrational at this point).
Consensus is a bad goal, because it can be upset by a tiny number of people willing to act in bad faith. Strategically speaking, it's better to press ahead in pursuit of the large goal and buy off key potential objectors.
Hope, yes. And yes, we basically need to invent wings before we go plummeting off of this particular cliff because the stopping option was probably lost over a decade ago. But too much forcing of positivity comes off as dishonest as well. We don't need to convince deniers at this point. They're dug in emotionally, and it's not likely they'll change their minds even if some natural disaster takes their home or loved ones. We do need people to know that this is it: it's now or never to start acting on the problem.
Humans aren't generally logical; we're capable of logic, but it's not our general state of consciousness. Narrative is our one, overarching "innovation" we've achieved over our nearest relatives. Narrative is a kind of data compression algorithm, if you will. By connecting facts via story, we can keep track of enormous amounts of data over a long period of time.
Tragic species enact tragic, destructive, eschatological narratives. Sustainable species enact positive, nurturing and generative narratives. If we can communicate a message that is the latter, we have a chance of survival.
I have always disliked specieist attitudes that humans are unique in X.
Other beings can have desires, wants, likes, dislikes, personalities. If you look closely, every pigeon is unique in its gait, what it likes to eat. Even worker ants each have a different way of walking.
Does this article have a point? It talks about several attempts to save the seas, some of which it claims were ill-conceived but seems to lack a central thesis.
I think the point is that viral "dying oceans" memes and stories may be undermining conservation efforts.
They are too emotionally powerful and pull our collective focus away from the science.
It frames the problems we face as impossibly bad and tragic, which makes some people give up, while others want drastic experiments that can cause more harm than good.
I think this is characteristic of the time we are in. People, being connected by the internet, have a new level of awareness about the world around us.
We don’t yet (collectively) know what to do with this knowledge. It is a reorienting time. Memes are one way people are trying to orient, they are probes being sent out to encounter reality.
But I agree with what you’re hinting at, we will step out of this place with concrete meaningful steps. And science is a very good way to find meaning.
It’s not really awareness though, it is tragedy porn. People like feeling “woke” and everyone is very willing to sell that to them. Just write stories about how something people are doing is ruining something people are worried about. It doesn’t have to be particularly true.
This cheap “awareness” doesn’t help solve problems, it creates conflict between people who like the tragedy stories and people who don’t like them, neither group really having much understanding or ability to think critically about the issues at hand and then... The only thing that gets talked about is the conflict and the taking of sides.
Personally, I think “creates awareness” vs “creates conflict” is a false dichotomy. It can be both.
But... isn’t your comment doing just the thing you are saying is destructive? Are you woke to something here, which is animating you, and it’s not exactly based in evidence?
I read that page through, and didn't find it particularly compelling. Do you have anything that isn't 5 years old, and that doesn't try to talk around the issue by redefining terms?
What I mean is that when I think of when I would say "the ocean is dying," I'm referring to things like declining fish populations, coral reefs dying off, and the oceans themselves getting warmer and more acidic.
These things are undoubtedly happening. We have measured them, and we are causing it. Your link seems to say something like "the ocean isn't dying, because we still can do something about it." I'm not particularly concerned with this "ocean health index" they mention. I am not concerned with what we "can" do; I'm only concerned with what we are and will be doing. And, at this rate, what we are doing is not enough.
The point is that the oceans are large, there are different concerns, and conditions vary across location and species.
If you want to answer a question like "how healthy are our oceans?" you need to first work out what that might mean, and then measure that systematically like the project I linked you to.
Why do we need to attach a number to it for it to be a valid concern? The ocean is undoubtedly changing in ways that, if allowed to continue, will cause massive ecosystem damage, leading to secondary effects on land, such as increased warming and higher CO2 levels. Why is that not enough to convince anyone who matters to do anything?
There is plenty of data. We've known this day was coming since the 1970's. Economic interests be damned, we need to do something now to avoid the collapse of civilization.
But the rest of the article doesn't support that. It talks mostly about failed conservation efforts, which weren't stopped by fear but because they were ineffective.
The relationship sounds more parasitical than symbiotic. I see how we benefit at its expense. What do we do that benefits it, and do those benefits outweigh how much we trash it? I'm no expert, but it doesn't seem close.
> The ocean has thus become emblematic both of a natural world victimized by humanity and of nature’s possible vengeance.
Nature is not cute and cuddly. Nature has always been dangerous to humans. The Ice Age almost wiped out humanity. And this was before any modern industrial developments or pollution. Plagues have been ravaging humanity for millenia. Mothers and infants died by the millions. Even for other species, most members end their lives either starving to death, or being eaten, many times while they are still alive and sensate.
It is humanity learning to control and harness nature that has made us what we are. We learned to get more food that nature would naturally give. We learned to treat diseases. We learned how to control plagues. We learned to control maternal and infant mortality. We learned to fly. We learned to go to space. We learned to tame and control nature for our benefit.
For the future, we are going to have to go all in on science and technology. It is our only hope. Harmony with nature is life that is nasty, brutish, and short.
> We learned to get more food that nature would naturally give. We learned to treat diseases. We learned how to control plagues. We learned to control maternal and infant mortality. We learned to fly. We learned to go to space. We learned to tame and control nature for our benefit.
Uh, go us? We also invest far more in weapons, fighting, and potential fighting, than any other single one of the above. We invented nuclear weapons and build a hundred thousand of them, and the primary purpose of going to space was to feed tech into rockets to deliver them anywhere on Earth in 40 minutes. We pioneered genocide and now we are working on perfecting ecocide.
Science and technology are only as good as the ends to which they are directed. That so far is primarily war and making money. But that's redundant. War is about making money, too.
'Some theorists and scientists advocate greater inclusion of nonhuman actors in debates about ecological crisis. Bruno Latour, for example, argues that “a science of objects and politics of subjects” must be replaced by a “political ecology of collectives consisting of humans and nonhumans.”'
Uh-huh. Why should I take that more seriously than an evidence-based assessment that there's a pretty good chance that it's too late and we're fucked? The latter at least has the advantage of not being gibberish.
Most people get that talking about a "dying" ocean isn't an animistic assertion of some new form of hive life. They understand that it's a metaphor, and a particularly appropriate one. People who read and study in this field should be perfectly comfortable with models that treat complex systems like ecologies and economies as having many similarities to organisms. Those models account for reality better than static ones. Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis wasn't based on some hippy religious creed. It was based on his criticism that existing climate models did not account for the fact that earth's biosphere was perfectly capable of modifying climate, and that it reacts when disturbed. You might recognize that as a fundamental principle in modern Climate Science.
The article doesn't seem to offer much but a call to police each other's language and avoid appearing pessimistic. That's a difficult challenge given the nature of the problem and our success thus far in addressing it. James "the earth and I are both in the last 1% of our lives" Lovelock developed the Gaia Hypothesis in the 1960s. James Hansen made his first forecast about these issues thirty-two years ago. That's enough time to redevelop the US Space program, from Sputnik through Apollo, more than twice. Yet we have done nothing substantial to address it. As our scientific understanding of these complex systems improves, we don't apply it to ameliorating the problem---as near as I can tell, we primarily use it to demonstrate that earlier estimates lowballed the problem and that it's really going to be much worse and sooner.
When promoters of a 'Green New Deal' and Al Gore---the mightiest unexamined motive in Christendom---agree that nuclear energy must be excluded without examination because "nuclear bad, sun pretty", I find it pretty hard to take the whole thing as anything but theatre. The problem isn't that we're being too pessimistic---it's that it's becoming increasingly clear that our most pessimistic projections might be wildly optimistic.
Staying optimistic in the face of a difficult project to solve a problem might be productive. Staying optimistic in the face of a problem that no one is doing anything to solve is more of a learning disability than a strategy. Maybe the best path for a solution is less "hey, we need to stay upbeat and positive" and more "it's time to start slapping some sense into some of these people."
My parents' generation went to the moon. My generation decided that we'd rather get rich and then let our kids choke to death on our waste products. At least we'll deserve whatever happens to us.
> My generation decided that we'd rather get rich and then let our kids choke to death on our waste products.
i think this really has to do with the paralysis of our public (and private) institutions to deal with externalities... in the 60s and 70s even a hard-core conservative like nixon would pass amendments to the clean air act or establish the epa... nowadays, even obama couldnt pass a new act through congress with even a majority in both houses!
we have institutional paralysis, and it will take a lot of work (or immediate crisis) to unwind the monied (and self) interests' influence on the system (imo)
If you are interested as to why that is I very much recommend you to read I to the toxic transparency paradox that James D'Angelo has written extensively about
The short outline is that congressional transparency serves interest groups exponentially more than to the public itself through intimidation tactics to the legislative branch
The public has secret ballots to avoid vote buying and all sorts of deviancies of the democratic process, yet the entire legislative branch doesn't?
> it's that it's becoming increasingly clear that our most pessimistic projections might be wildly optimistic.
The engine driving it all is the pursuit of perpetual exponential growth. It doesnt matter if it is 1%, 2%, 3%, or even .1% for that matter. Exponential growth will consume this planet leading to ruin.
Resources may be finite but human ingenuity, appropriately harnessed, doesn't have to be. Increased technological capacity can also create access to resources previously inaccessible, such as asteroid mining.
Human beings spend a lot more time perceiving the social structures they are in (even when they're not aware that they are doing so) than they do reacting to "objective" reality or nature. A lot of people in the world see themselves as being cast aside or outside the current dominant social structures. Convincing them to make sacrifices for the future when the present already seems irredeemably shitty is a losing political argument. Casting nature as yet another political constituency that they need to pay deference too is foolish.
Messages of hope are the only ones that will work to build consensus (even if hope seems irrational at this point).
Edit:
Personally, I think the only rational message of hope right now is that we should be ploughing as much money into science and technology as we can. We certainly shouldn't take our eye off the ball for dealing with climate change, but it seems obvious that we're going to need some pretty amazing technological breakthroughs if we're going to survive as a species.