Post by account_disabled on Mar 12, 2024 9:16:19 GMT
You use reusable bottles, cloth bags and bar soaps . You scrupulously separate the garbage and, lately, on social networks you follow influencers who keep their (very few) waste in a glass jar. But then the TV reminds you of extreme phenomena , the rise in sea levels and the decline of ice in the Arctic, and you look disconsolately at your menstrual cup . All that biking and composting, you think, for nothing.
The debate about whether individual action France Mobile Number List is useful has been going on for a long time. With each alert about the situation of the planet, media and blogs are filled with articles with “five things you can do to fight climate change.” Activists and experts often argue: are they useful for anything?
An example: last October, scientists warned that “drastic” and “unprecedented” measures are urgently needed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees. Then, CNN tweeted the following : “Scared by the new climate change report? Here’s what you can do to help.” Among other things, the chain proposed eating 30% less meat and changing the car and plane for the bus or train. An American journalist, Kate Aronoff, responded to the tweet , sarcastically, suggesting that the recommendations should be: “Take over the State. Nationalize the fossil fuel industry. Rapidly decrease production. Fund a massive employment program to decarbonize each sector of the economy.” With something similar he ironized a recent cartoon by Flavita Banana in EL PAÍS , in which, in the middle of a desert landscape, with dead trees and fish, a voice announced: “I told you to recycle, Antonio.”
These jokes reflect a skeptical stance, especially in left-wing circles, regarding these benevolent advice from institutions, media and companies; the feeling that the problem is being simplified, that responsibility is being placed on the shoulders of citizens and consumers, and that, on top of that, the system feigns concern but washes its hands. Martin Lukacs summed it up in a 2017 article in The Guardian : “Would you advise someone to take a fly swatter to a gun fight? That he tried to put out a fire in a house with towels? For critics like him, something similar is the insistence of advertising that we change the light bulbs at home for low-consumption ones while the North Pole thaws.
Campaigns focused on individual action have been booming since the early 2000s (remember An Inconvenient Truth , the Al Gore documentary that encouraged viewers to recycle in the final credits). The book Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Made to Ignore Climate Change (George Marshall, 2014) reveals some problems with these approaches. First, these campaigns can convey the feeling that the problem is ultimately your fault (and humans don't respond well to blame). Second, even those who are most aware of the ecological threat tend to make only small gestures that simultaneously ease their conscience and justify unethical behavior. Psychologists call this mechanism “moral license,” which allows us, for example, to buy efficient appliances to use them much more than we used the previous ones.
Recently, an international commission of scientists proposed an “ideal” dietary diet to simultaneously save the planet and human health, which consisted of limiting meat consumption to the equivalent of one small beef burger per week. This is an example that our daily decisions matter, a lot. But, skeptics point out, it is advisable not to get distracted: we need governments to approve and apply laws and industries, to make decisions about large-scale consumption. Morten Fibieger Byskov, researcher at the Department of Political and International Studies at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom), warns that at the same time that the focus of attention is placed too much on the individual, responsibility is shifted away from governments and industries. And shifting responsibility is not the answer: “When Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement and cities across the country proclaimed that they would continue to comply with the pacts… It is fantastic that they were willing to do so, but this position also allowed the Government of Trump evades his duty. I don't think it's right to shift responsibility from those who should have it to those who are willing to take it on,” he says by email .
Trump's election was precisely what prompted Kim Cobb, a researcher at Georgia Tech University (USA) who firmly believes in the importance of day-to-day activism, to change her life from top to bottom. The 2016 election results made it clear to her that the climate change policies she wanted were not going to happen in the near future. “I was very depressed thinking about four years of attacks on science, of reversing policies… So I decided to address some things myself,” she says in an audio message. “On January 1, 2017, I decided to ride my bike to work and walk with my children to school twice a week (previously we went by car). He was addictive—we now ride our bikes to work and school every day—and he was, above all, empowering . I realized that there is a whole way of living that I had never considered, that was very satisfying and that was in accordance with my principles.” She continued down that path, taking 75% fewer flights than before. She is now preparing his house to be 100% solar.
The debate about whether individual action France Mobile Number List is useful has been going on for a long time. With each alert about the situation of the planet, media and blogs are filled with articles with “five things you can do to fight climate change.” Activists and experts often argue: are they useful for anything?
An example: last October, scientists warned that “drastic” and “unprecedented” measures are urgently needed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees. Then, CNN tweeted the following : “Scared by the new climate change report? Here’s what you can do to help.” Among other things, the chain proposed eating 30% less meat and changing the car and plane for the bus or train. An American journalist, Kate Aronoff, responded to the tweet , sarcastically, suggesting that the recommendations should be: “Take over the State. Nationalize the fossil fuel industry. Rapidly decrease production. Fund a massive employment program to decarbonize each sector of the economy.” With something similar he ironized a recent cartoon by Flavita Banana in EL PAÍS , in which, in the middle of a desert landscape, with dead trees and fish, a voice announced: “I told you to recycle, Antonio.”
These jokes reflect a skeptical stance, especially in left-wing circles, regarding these benevolent advice from institutions, media and companies; the feeling that the problem is being simplified, that responsibility is being placed on the shoulders of citizens and consumers, and that, on top of that, the system feigns concern but washes its hands. Martin Lukacs summed it up in a 2017 article in The Guardian : “Would you advise someone to take a fly swatter to a gun fight? That he tried to put out a fire in a house with towels? For critics like him, something similar is the insistence of advertising that we change the light bulbs at home for low-consumption ones while the North Pole thaws.
Campaigns focused on individual action have been booming since the early 2000s (remember An Inconvenient Truth , the Al Gore documentary that encouraged viewers to recycle in the final credits). The book Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Made to Ignore Climate Change (George Marshall, 2014) reveals some problems with these approaches. First, these campaigns can convey the feeling that the problem is ultimately your fault (and humans don't respond well to blame). Second, even those who are most aware of the ecological threat tend to make only small gestures that simultaneously ease their conscience and justify unethical behavior. Psychologists call this mechanism “moral license,” which allows us, for example, to buy efficient appliances to use them much more than we used the previous ones.
Recently, an international commission of scientists proposed an “ideal” dietary diet to simultaneously save the planet and human health, which consisted of limiting meat consumption to the equivalent of one small beef burger per week. This is an example that our daily decisions matter, a lot. But, skeptics point out, it is advisable not to get distracted: we need governments to approve and apply laws and industries, to make decisions about large-scale consumption. Morten Fibieger Byskov, researcher at the Department of Political and International Studies at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom), warns that at the same time that the focus of attention is placed too much on the individual, responsibility is shifted away from governments and industries. And shifting responsibility is not the answer: “When Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement and cities across the country proclaimed that they would continue to comply with the pacts… It is fantastic that they were willing to do so, but this position also allowed the Government of Trump evades his duty. I don't think it's right to shift responsibility from those who should have it to those who are willing to take it on,” he says by email .
Trump's election was precisely what prompted Kim Cobb, a researcher at Georgia Tech University (USA) who firmly believes in the importance of day-to-day activism, to change her life from top to bottom. The 2016 election results made it clear to her that the climate change policies she wanted were not going to happen in the near future. “I was very depressed thinking about four years of attacks on science, of reversing policies… So I decided to address some things myself,” she says in an audio message. “On January 1, 2017, I decided to ride my bike to work and walk with my children to school twice a week (previously we went by car). He was addictive—we now ride our bikes to work and school every day—and he was, above all, empowering . I realized that there is a whole way of living that I had never considered, that was very satisfying and that was in accordance with my principles.” She continued down that path, taking 75% fewer flights than before. She is now preparing his house to be 100% solar.