A fellow eco activist (who is known for her deep scientific expertise as well as her public service in our county and bioregion) shared this article on her page. (She shared it on her personal page, and it was only shared with friends, so I’m just posting the gist of her comment.)
The article, by Dinah Pulver in USA today, reports that we are seeing record highs in carbon dioxide emissions. “For the first time, the May average exceeded 430 parts per million, reported scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa Observatory and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.”
And in response to this news, my friend posted, in a nutshell: How do we deal with the reality of increasingly extreme weather? Rather than finger-pointing, how do our communities adapt; and also, what state & local policy changes do we need?
In addition to being a matter for policy change, and for community adaptation, it will also need to be a matter of behavioral economics. And emotional processing; emotional regulation.
How do we go about de de-normalizing, de-popularizing the robber-baron lifestyle that is trashing and overheating the planet? And I’m not talking about billionaires here. I’m talking about the basic, mainstream, “comfortably off” middle-class USA lifestyle.
We may be beyond the ability to reverse things, if we ever were able. But recent years have shown that things can at the very least be slowed down more radically than expected. I’m talking about the environmental improvements we saw during the Covid shutdowns, when transportation (especially air travel + private automobile driving) and manufacturing were radically curtailed.
The middle-class lifestyle as we currently practice it is not sustainable, plainly put.
But social norms of what is “desirable” and “respectable” and “admirable” are very deeply rooted, so changing them involves a bit of effort. Madison Avenue + corporations have been able to make rapacious consumerism very very attractive, much against people & planet’s interest.
So how do we make non-consumerism, and the concept of “enough,” more attractive to a wider segment of the population?
We are going up against so many unprocessed emotions. It’s not hopeless though.
That’s one of what I consider my main self-appointed tasks as a sustainability educator. To get people to see the joy in backing down from the frenetic consumerist rush rush lifestyle. Even fellow environmentalists get caught up in this toxic lifestyle.
One of the things we have to show people is that we can live an extremely comfortable life at a much lower footprint then we are doing now. That’s what I’ve been trying to do for a while, and many others are out there showing it as well.
BTW the above-cited article’s author, Dinah Pulver, used to be the environmental writer for our local paper but is now an environment/climate researcher and writer on the national level.
PS. No, carbon dioxide is not the only index of planetary health. The other main greenhouse gases are nitrous oxide and methane. But it does serve as a fairly practical serviceable yardstick.