The environmental crisis is caused by limitations in our perceptions. We think about things we want much more than we think about things we don’t want. When you buy anything at the store, you think about what you’re going to use it for much more than you think about how much pollution was generated in creating it.
Our religions, political systems, and economic system are built on that misperception. Our ancient and modern beliefs about what’s supposed to happen, what we should do, and what it means to be in control of our lives, are based mainly on our feelings of what we want and much less on our understanding of the effects we have on the environment.
ACT I
Scene 1
[105 bpm]
The environmental crisis is where Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion joined the story.
The global environmental crisis was discovered in 1968, more than half a century ago.
I’m sure I don’t need to explain how climate change and the rest of it works.
Instead we can talk about it in terms of how it fits with the rest of this story.
Scene 2
We can start with zoology.
Here’s an experiment you can try.
Get down on your hands and knees.
Now think about where your brain is in relation to the rest of your body.
It’s in the front.
So are your eyes, your ears, your nose, and your tongue, meaning, four of your sensory organs.
Your mouth is in the front of your body too.
That’s where every other animal’s brain, sensory organs, and mouth are.
Now stand up.
Think about which direction your eyes and your mouth point.
Think about which direction your feet point.
Then think about which direction your arms and legs move most easily.
Think about the way the rest of your body parts are oriented.
Now lie down on your stomach.
Think about which direction would be easiest for you to crawl.
Now here’s the part that’s going to make this image stick in your mind.
Think about which direction your ass has been pointing this whole time.
Whether you’re standing up, crawling on all fours, or crawling on your stomach, it’s easiest for us, and every other animal species, to move toward the things we want and away from the things we don’t want.
So it’s no wonder that our brains evolved to notice and think about things we want much more than things we don’t want.
ACT II
Scene 1
Now let’s talk about the first principles of evolutionary psychology.
All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her genes by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.
The majority of human mental activity is subconscious.
All the components of the human brain structure evolved in or before the stone age.
The critical point here is the evolution of our perceptions.
Perception is sensory input plus interpretation.
You take in light through your eyes, sound through your ears, gaseous molecules through your nose, and you interpret it to mean something.
We can’t see, hear, smell, taste, or feel by touch any of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
We don’t perceive it because we don’t even sense it.
So our five natural senses don’t tell us anything directly about the effects of carbon dioxide on the
atmosphere
Scene 2
What about problems you can sense but still can’t perceive directly?
You can see a tree being cut down.
You can see a whole forest being cut down.
You can interpret that to be bad, for whatever reason, and decide you don’t want forests to be cut down.
But you can’t see all the forests in the world from where you are.
You can’t even go to all the forests in the world to see them for yourself. Today there are 40 million square kilometers of forest in the world. Forty million minutes is about 76 years.
Even though we can see forests, there’s no way for anyone to see all of the forests.
So there’s no way for us to perceive global deforestation directly.
Scene 3
For every decision we make, we perceive some benefit to ourselves, or to someone or something we care about.
Most people feel there are benefits to driving automobiles, manufacturing things in factories, and using wood and paper products. We can see ourselves driving faster than we can walk. We can see ourselves carrying more with us in a vehicle than we could carry ourselves.
We can see uses for manufactured goods and forest products. So we have good reasons for wanting those things.
We perceive climate change, deforestation, and the rest of the environmental crisis now because people found ways to work around the gaps in our perceptions.
We can’t see carbon dioxide, but we can see the machines that measure it. We can see graphs that show how it has increased over the years. And we can hear people talk about what that means.
Scene 4
The reason you and I and anyone else know about climate change, deforestation, and the problems they cause, is because people told us about it in terms we could understand and believe.
When we see automobiles and factories now we think of carbon dioxide and climate change, because we’ve learned about them. When we see forests being cut down now we think of global deforestation because we learned about that.
The question now is: How do we change people’s perceptions? Why have the things that have changed our perceptions not changed other people’s perceptions?What could change them?
The problem is ideology.
No three or four year old knows the chemistry, physics, or math involved in greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. But as young children we start developing our worldviews. A big part of that development comes from the stories we hear from older people.
You believe in the environmental crisis now because what you’ve heard about it fits with the rest of your worldview. But that didn’t happen for everyone. So why is your worldview different from other people’s?
That’s a huge question.
ACT III
Scene 1
Your worldview is made up of everything you feel to be true.
We don’t know about chemistry and physics when we’re three. Instead we believe what our parents tell us.
Did our parents tell us ideas that were adaptable to the idea of climate change? Or did they tell us ideas that weren’t adaptable?
Our parents aren’t the only people we learn ideas from, but they are the first. The point is that we build ideas on top of other ideas our whole lives, beginning from the time we learn to talk. Ideas that conflict with environmental science don’t add up to an understanding of climate change.
People who deny climate change don’t argue that math, chemistry, or physics aren’t real. They argue either that climate change can’t be happening or that humans can’t be causing it. They can’t accept that humans could be responsible for climate change because it conflicts with something they already believe. So they assume that either climate scientists are making it up, or that they’re missing something from their calculations that would prove it isn’t happening or that humans aren’t causing it.
Scene 2
We know who the climate science deniers are. We know their arguments because we hear them all the time. So let’s talk about why people think that way.
Many religious people don’t believe in climate change because it conflicts with their religious beliefs. Many believe that their god wouldn’t do something like that to them.
On the other hand, many Christian fundamentalists welcome the idea of total global destruction, because according to their worldviews, that would be the Battle of Armageddon, which would herald the return of Jesus.
Religions tell stories about what they consider to be the most important patterns of cause and effect that make the universe function. They often wrap morality into the stories also. Christianity, and some other religions, don’t make a clear distinction between cause and effect and morality.
If the origin of all cause and effect is a god who is described as having human-like emotions, and he wants people to behave in certain ways, morality is part of cause and effect. Because the all-powerful god who makes everything happen makes things happen in ways that favor the people who do what he wants, and disfavor people who don’t do what he wants.
Scene 3
The problem here is fairly straightforward.
Religious stories weave together morality, cause and effect, and purpose, and they bring together groups of people who believe the stories. Combined, the morality, cause and effect, and purpose give the people a framework for a functional community.
The problem that science— especially anything related to evolution or environmental science— poses for religions is that it disrupts people’s sense of cause and effect.
If environmentalists start telling you that you’re doing something that threatens to cause catastrophic damage to the world and horrific death and suffering, your first reaction is probably that they must be making it up, because your religion says that the people of your religion aren’t that evil.
Your next reaction is that those people must be trying to disrupt your sense of cause and effect.
Your next reaction would probably be that they must be trying to disrupt your communities whose sense of morality and purpose depends on your shared sense of cause and effect.
This might sound ridiculous, but many people who don’t believe in climate change probably feel that if they start believing in it their children will grow up to be drug addicts and murderers and prostitutes.
ACT IV
Scene 1
Many businesspeople deny climate science because it gets in their way of making money. Many economists deny climate science because they don’t know how to fit it into their economic models. These two problems are basically the same.
Essentially, to them climate science is a newspaper written in a foreign language. These people just don’t have the mental tools to process the information.
Capitalism is the belief that people should use the resources they control to make profits. On one level that’s a very simple, intuitive economic model. All living things, including cockroaches, worms, and bacteria use the resources they control to benefit themselves— meaning, to try to maximize the survival rates of their genes.
On the other hand, people thinking that simplistically obscures a lot of important facts about how we interact with the world.
Scene 2
Capitalism depends on the ownership of resources.
To own something means to exercise ultimate decision making power over it.
When you try to measure the value of a thing in terms of how much profit someone could make from it, you can’t measure any value in it unless you can imagine someone selling it to someone else.
That means transferring the ownership of it. That means transferring ultimate decision making power over it.
To be able to imagine something having a dollar value, you have to be able to imagine someone buying it. That means you have to be able to imagine someone being in a position to sell it. Or at least you have to be able to imagine the dollar amount of whatever someone would have to invest to create or take possession of the thing.
Either way, you’re still talking about ownership of the thing.
If you can describe the value of something without talking about money, then you’re talking about the thing having value separately from our financial system. That means you’re talking about value that can’t be bought and sold. Which means, owned.
How much is a Black person worth?
How much is a dead Native American worth?
Today you have to think a moment to come up with words to even begin to
answer those questions.
But 200 years ago, a lot of people in America could name a dollar amount off the top of their heads. Because 200 years ago, Black people could be bought and sold. 200 years ago the US government paid for the scalps of Native Americans, because they were proof that someone had killed them. That’s where the word redskins, as in the Washington Redskins, came from.
Our financial system works differently today than it did 200 years ago because we have different laws about what you can sell, buy, or otherwise invest in taking control of. Meaning, own.
How much is the Atlantic Ocean worth?
You can’t use a Capitalist economic model to answer that question unless you can imagine someone owning the ocean, deciding what it will be used for, and then selling to someone else.
How could one person make money from the Atlantic Ocean and prevent anyone else from using it? Would they put a fence around the entire ocean and charge people admission to it?
Thinking about the world in terms of the ownership of resources means you can’t measure any value in a thing until you can imagine a way to own it and use it as a resource.
Scene 3
Who owns the atmosphere?
That’s where the greenhouse effect is happening.
But unless you can talk about how many dollars people are making or losing on the atmosphere, people who think about the world in terms of the ownership of resources don’t see it as a problem.
If no one can own it, it has no value, so it doesn’t figure into their economic models.
Scene 4
Many politicians deny climate science also. Many of them probably don’t believe in it. But even if they do believe in it, if their voter base doesn’t believe in it, they can’t get elected and re-elected by talking about it publicly. Or at least, not by talking about it publicly as anything we should take seriously.
Scene 5
The environmental crisis isn’t really a scientific problem anymore.
We understand the problem. We know how the science works. We learn more about it every day.
At this point it’s mainly a philosophical problem.
How does it fit into people’s worldviews?
Why do we believe in it?
Why don’t other people believe in it?
How do we get more people to believe in it?
And what can those of us who believe in it now do about it now?
ACT V
Scene 1
The biologists and mathematicians who discovered the global environmental crisis realized back in 1968 that it was a philosophical problem. In fact, it’s the biggest philosophical problem humanity has ever faced.
The way people had been thinking up until then, assuming the global environment would stay the same forever no matter what we did, was what got us into that problem. To solve it we had to find a new way of thinking. We had to find a new level of consciousness for people worldwide.
Whether people deny climate change for religious, business, economic, or political reasons, they all have the same ultimate cause. All these people are heavily invested in a way of thinking that climate change doesn’t fit into.
Scene 2
Religions, communities, and political and economic systems all depend on a group of people agreeing on patterns of cause and effect.
Religious, economic, and political climate science deniers can all fall back on the same explanation for climate science: “Liberal environmentalists want to destroy our society.”
They’re not completely wrong in thinking that. If your idea of environmentalism means telling people about your worldview and expecting them to accept it, regardless of the fact that it conflicts with the concepts of cause and effect that their societies depend on, you are trying to destroy their society, even if you don’t notice you’re doing it.
That being said, the anti-science movement is based on a lot of strategic ignorance by a lot of well educated people. Church members, shoppers, and voters come from all walks of life, which means the majority of them don’t have college educations.
But the religious leaders, economic leaders, and political leaders who promote anti-science almost always have college educations. They aren’t just random people off the street. The purpose of continuing your education beyond high school is to learn to think about the world in bigger terms, and most of them chose to do that.
Scene 3
At this level the philosophical puzzle comes down to one simple question:
What’s the main thing you believe is supposed to happen in life?
Do you feel that you’re supposed to get what you want?
The history of Christianity and of the economic and political systems of the US, is a story of people mostly getting what they want. Which is why all three of them have been so successful and popular over the centuries. That makes it easy for people to assume that pattern should last forever.
Or do you feel that you’re one part of a world that’s much bigger and more powerful than any of us?
While we can learn about the world and figure out ways to make it more favorable for us, we don’t own the world because there’s no way for us to exert ultimate decision making power over it.
That’s a story where in spite of 200 years of success, or 2,000 or 10,000, we still have to be smart about what we’re doing, because we can still lose.
Scene 4
Solving the problem of environmental science undermining the understanding of cause and effect for large numbers of people and making their societies break down depends on effective communication to many people at once, so that many people can learn it together, move forward together, and keep their communities intact.
The better we understand the philosophical problems of how people think now, how they need to think, and what changes people’s minds, the better we can do that.