Discussion about this post

User's avatar
SUE Speaks's avatar

I pay to subscribe to you, Robert Reich, Michael Moore, Chris Hedges, Talking Points Memo, and Heather Cox Richardson and follow what you and the others of your ilk have to say, noting that you all come from the same understandings but are just popular gadflies flailing away at this unworkable world. What you/we lack for is a concerted voice. Without any great leader speaking for us, how can we get any real power for the good? How about posing that question?

Expand full comment
docrhw Weil's avatar

Thom your work is excellent as always, though I have a couple of tiny quibbles. It's more likely that people came to America through the Bering Strait than the Barents Sea, though it's possible they arrived by both ways. And groups that died out left no descendants, not ancestors. But those are minor points. Your information is quite correct, and it's frustrating, to say the least.

And you're right about the politics! I'm finishing a US Fire Academy course on how a shifting environment has to be planned for...but never once does it mention climate change.

Basically the problem is that most people don't connect the dots and apply the big scale events to their own lives. It's understandable as they don't have the knowledge, the habitual viewpoint, or the time to worry about things that they feel are beyond their control. The same seems true at all levels of society and perhaps at all times. Who wants to live in such a depressing situation? For example, as the Roman Empire slowly fell apart the writers of the day, far more informed than the ordinary citizens, generally said that the state had been through bad times before and had come out of them. A few seem to have worried more, but they were ignored. And anyone in today’s American government who says we're on the down slope will have a very short political career. Obama labeled such people “declinists” and while some in the national government might know better, they certainly aren’t talking.

I will say what gives me hope is the younger generation. I'm teaching environmental science at the college level and my students--and actually some of them are middle aged--are quite aware about many environmental issues. And they are certainly not alone. Now it's quite likely that the current generation of top level politicians will be gone in a few years; many are in their 70s and 80s and we might well get a shift comparable to the "torch is passed" time from Eisenhower to Kennedy. Together these factors could move the paradigm. And certainly what’s happening to the world can’t be ignored forever. If anything the pandemic work people up to the fact that we don't control nature. I don’t know whether all this will be enough to turn things around. But it could be a start.

Expand full comment
20 more comments...

No posts