Many care until it becomes too hard to care. Until it takes too much time and is no longer fun and it becomes too real. However, climate change is a reality. It’s something that needs to be faced and won’t go away if ignored. Compare it to procrastinating on an essay that is due. You know you need to be productive and get it done, but you also know you can get that same feeling of accomplishment by doing something else, like cleaning your room. Now, imagine making effective changes to environmental policies is your essay and cleaning your room is banning straws and shaming individuals for their actions. One is much easier than the other and still provides a feeling of accomplishment. It also comes with the added benefit of ignoring the reality of how severe the actual situation is and the drastic measures that need to be taken.
Environmental degradation is caused by people in power and it is those same people that will need to support and act on environmental initiatives. Although climate change is an issue that affects everyone globally and everyone can make a change, the harsh reality is that those with a platform have the most influence over everyone else’s life. Unfortunately, as a collective, it appears that we will do absolutely everything besides dealing with the true problem until we feel that time crunch; the guilt from leaving the essay until the last minute and the final recognition of how much danger we are in.
We convince ourselves that reforestation and treating symptoms of environmental degradation is enough. We live under the illusion that we’re making a difference and we can just keep putting out fires, but when will we stop and truly prevent the causes instead of dealing with their consequences? This is not a new idea and that is what makes the situation all the more terrifying; that it has been said over and over and yet no one is truly listening. Recently Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explained quite clearly how wrong it was that the US legislative committee turned down the New Green Deal. While they were claiming it was too expensive, Ocasio-Cortez showed that the price of the deal will only continue to rise, saying: “This is not an elitist issue. This a quality of life issue”. She’s correct. People everywhere are being affected, whether that be due to the massive amount of crop failures, extreme weather, or the 143 million people predicted to be displaced due to climate change. Even with all of these extreme issues, it is still not enough. We don’t care until it affects us directly; until we can physically feel the effects happening. Which is why so many of those in power sit comfortably in their protected bubbles. They idly watch the rest of the global population and future generations struggle with the consequences of the decisions they’ve made.
Initiatives are continuously being put forward to help prevent further environmental degradation, but why are they not targeting corporations that have copious amounts power over the future of the world, or better yet the institutions giving them the “okay” to continue their activities? The classic response to this question is, “well it’s not that simple” and “we have the economy to think about”. Then why not make it that simple? Why continue to make issues more complicated than need be and make it harder for people to care? We create a seemingly formidable wall from overcomplicating topics, such as solutions to climate change, by copping out and explaining that the system doesn’t work that way. Greta Thunberg has come forward and at sixteen years old she has said what has needed to be said for a while: “if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, then we should change the system itself”. Make it easier to care because if we don’t then we have no support. The reality is we want to care, but we also love the easy way out. We will march and make signs and for a single day we’ll care, but when all is said and done we’ll go home and be finished caring.
Reforestation is an environmental initiative that is put forward to help counteract the deforestation that is rampaging globally and seemingly unhinged. It is causing not only mass environmental damages but also having detrimental social consequences on indigenous peoples. Although reforestation is beneficial to many areas of degraded land and aids in trapping some of our CO2 emissions, it glazes over the fact that these newly planted trees can very easily be cut down in a manner of years. Instead of actually preventing multinational corporations and their continuous mass slashing of forests, we attempt to clean up their destruction and allow them to continue because we are somehow more afraid of losing current economic growth than we are of losing our future. We care about the wrong things. We care that the trees are being cut down, but just not enough to actually prevent it from happening. Instead, we care about the revenue it brings our economy without realizing that there will be no economy if there is no earth.
This phenomenon of only caring about what is easy to care about is also seen in the rapid rates of defaunation and the clear streamlined support of specific species. Similar to anti-deforestation propaganda showing beautiful natural landscapes that are being degraded, chilling photos of elephants and rhinos having their tusks stripped away for their valuable ivory is every other photo on social media. Foundations to help save keystone species such as pandas, lions and orcas will grab peoples attention; make them care about biodiversity conservation with species that they can somehow connect to. This is all strategic. It’s known that the general population won’t care if a single obscure species of Amazonian frogs go extinct, because most people can’t connect to that idea. We can give them numbers and stats and explain that the loss of one species throws off the entire ecological equilibrium within that ecosystem, but people won’t care. We domesticate cute, fluffy animals and can easily relate to them, so those are the ones being shown; animals that you will care about if they go extinct. In reality, the 80% loss of distribution of 177 mammal species between 1900 and 2015 will have significant economic, social and political consequences as well as the already known environmental ones.
We don’t care enough, but we convince ourselves that we do by picking the smaller fights and leaving the bigger ones. Understanding that environmental degradation is a multi-disciplinary issue that will have detrimental ramifications on political, economic and social aspects of everyone’s life is known, and yet we sit and watch it happen. We understand that our system does not allow for effective solutions because we care more about the economy. We care more about who has the most money and control, instead of who knows how to best utilize the benefits of globalization. We need to give power to those that know how to positively manipulate this global interconnectedness that we have created so they can establish global initiatives to prevent further environmental degradation. To break down this issue we need to break down how we care and how we act. Doing what is needed and what will be needed in the future. Not only caring about what is easy to care about but instead caring enough to take on the complicated issues of climate change.
