We naturally perceive some parts about how the environment works better than we perceive other parts of it. Those are the things we have to learn about to understand.
Our most profound sensory illusion is a misunderstanding of how energy moves through the environment versus how it moves through the universe as a whole. But if we can understand that illusion, we can understand all the others.
ACT I
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How far back in our past did the environmental crisis begin?
At what point did people start misinterpreting how the environment works and making the decisions that led us here?
A lot of people like to blame it on economic systems or political systems or religions. But the problem started much further back in the evolution of our species.
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The whole reason science exists is because of limitations in our perceptions.
The reason we specify that the five steps of science are for information to be observable, self consistent, universal, reproducible, and debatable is because our perceptions are reliable in some ways but unreliable in other ways.
Science works by triangulating among the reliable parts of the perceptions of multiple people who have the necessary skills and resources to access the information, in order to verify that they’re all seeing the same thing.
If we naturally perceived the world the way the world actually works, no one would have invented science, because all of us would already know all the scientific discoveries that have ever been made.
We’d all be born knowing Albert Einstein’s Theories of Relativity and Mass-Energy Equivalence. No one today would know who Einstein was because he never would’ve thought of anything that everyone else didn’t already know.
Obviously that’s not what happened.
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The reason we have these limitations on our perceptions is because our sensory organs and brains, just like the rest our bodies, evolved to maximize the survival rates of our genes in or before the stone age.
All of our body parts, including our perception organs, evolved because people who had these kinds of body parts tended to have higher rates of survival and reproduction than people who had other kinds of body parts.
We have to learn about the dangers of the environmental crisis for the same reason we have to learn about the dangers of electrical wires, guns, and cholesterol. It’s not a threat that affected our ancestors in the conditions of their evolution.
We know that people can adapt their thinking to changing times, because we’ve seen it happen within the histories of our countries. Here in the US men got the right to vote in 1776— even though back then it was limited to men who owned land and were at least 32 years old..
It took 144 more years for women to gain the same voting rights as men. But today, a century later, no one is having a serious debate about whether women should be allowed to vote.
In July of 1776, 56 men signed their names to the Declaration of Independence. Forty-one of them were slave owners.
That problem hasn’t been completely solved, because the racism the slave system depended on is still with us in many ways. But even so, no one today is having a serious discussion about repealing the 13th Amendment.
ACT II
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How far down in human subconsciousness do our misperceptions about environmental science begin? Get ready for some bad news.
Think about the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Matter and energy always move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration more than they move from areas of low concentration to areas of high concentration. Stars contain a lot of energy, but it radiates out into space over the course of billions of years, until the stars burn out and die.
A small fraction of the energy from our sun hits the Earth and supplies almost all the energy for life. Plants grow by taking in the energy of sunlight and using it to power
chemical reactions that create large molecules.
The sunlight energy that’s stored in the bonds of those molecules is the energy we take in from eating plants. Or we feed the plants to animals, get them to convert the sunlight energy into large molecules, and then we eat the animals.
(That extra step makes it a much less efficient way for us to eat sunlight. But it does bring with it proteins and other nutrients that aren’t as easy to find in plants.)
Fossil fuels come from the remains of plants and animals that turned sunlight into large molecules and got buried underground without decomposing completely. The Industrial Revolution began when people started making widespread use of that highly concentrated energy.
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The Laws of Thermodynamics are the most fundamental laws of physics. Because they express the mathematical relationships in the movement of matter and energy through the universe.
On the scale of the universe, matter and energy move from high concentration to low concentration more than they move from low concentration to high concentration. That’s why stars give off energy and the universe is expanding.
But here on Earth, beginning from the time life evolved 3.5 billion years ago, those mathematical relationships have been working in the opposite direction.
Evolution happens through replication, variation, and selection. Those translate into thermodynamic terms as diffusion, diversification, and destruction.
Life evolved on Earth because the conditions here made three manifestations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics run into each other and reverse the flow of energy on Earth.
Life on Earth has been taking in energy for 3.5 billion years, and that energy has been building up in our environment. What began with sunlight shining on muddy water eventually created the environment that our species evolved in.
When our perceptions evolved, there was already a lot of energy stored up in large molecules of plants and animals.
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Even though thermodynamics make matter and energy move from order to disorder in the universe as a whole, here on Earth evolution has made them move from disorder to order.
What began with sunlight shining on muddy water moved up through increasing levels of complexity, from genes to cells to algae to seaweed to trees. And from genes to bacteria, worms, fish, reptiles, mammals, and eventually us.
The human brain is the most complicated, most highly ordered, object in the known universe. And each of us is born with one.
The Laws of Thermodynamics still affect people directly on Earth. Every time you get hungry or cold you’re feeling energy leaving your body faster than it’s being replaced. Every time you get injured you’re feeling the matter in your body move from order to disorder more than it’s moving from disorder to order. All of us can starve to death, freeze to death, or bleed to death.
But we, and our perceptions, are all descended from people who lived long enough to have children. Instead of from people who died quickly.
Our perceptions evolved from millions of years of people and chimpanzees getting what they wanted in a world full of plants and animals. Which means in a world full of sunlight energy stored in large molecules powering the cycles of life.
While many people died along the way, all of our ancestors lived long enough to give birth to the next generation, and passed along the perceptions that worked so well for them.
ACT III
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When you ask, “What do you feel is supposed to happen in life?” two answers are right, on different levels.
We are all part of a world that’s much bigger and more powerful than any of us, where we have to stay smart or we’re going to lose.
And at the same time, we do feel like we’re supposed to get what we want in life, because we’re descended from millions of years of people who got what they wanted in the world as they understood it.
It’s not that climate science deniers don’t understand the world at all. They understand it well on a level that just isn’t relevant to climate science.
When they extrapolate from what they do understand about the world to try to understand climate science, they get the wrong answer.
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Not everyone on the anti-science side is really opposed to science.
Some people are so committed to whatever they believe that they’ll never change their minds.
Some people, however, believe in anti-science stories because the people who tell those stories have made them more convincing to them than people who tell science stories.
That’s why there’s always going to be a need for people to learn science and communication skills. There’s always going to be a need for people to tell the unified story in their own ways. There’s always going to be a need for people to make direct connections between science and other subjects and skills as much as possible.
The more ways there are for people to learn about and use science, the more people the unifying story will reach. That includes people who currently are being tricked into believing anti-science stories.
We can’t get rid of the anti-science people completely.
But we can drain away their supporters.