Cultural Values Change, You Won’t Stay In the Same ‘Climate’ Forever

A cultural change will change the climate

Culture changes over time. The values and ideas once held sacred two thousand year ago no longer hold. The same goes for even one hundred years ago. Less slavery. More votes. More insistence on democracy and voice is evident when it finally seeps into the human cultural mindset.

There is backlash, a sign of authoritarian desperation. As a major election year worldwide, 2024 will display this desperation.

The climate, of course, has always naturally changed — ask any whale who was once a cow, or any chicken who was once a dinosaur. Or, note any plant fossil that has been extinct for hundreds of millions of years. Or, talk to full blooded Neanderthals that are rare at dinner parties.

The climate change you hear of today as a polarizing topic, is accelerated and new. It’s Human Emissions Climate Crisis: HECC; it’s nothing like all the previous nature-induced climate changes that Earth has seen over her last five extinctions. Landscapes, seascapes, and ice-scapes all change in the vast time scale, or more rarely, more suddenly, as with asteroid strikes.

Heated discussions are also happening

But, what could be termed ‘climate change’ is our changing attitudes. The idea that we could heat the planet should provoke the idea that we can cool the planet. Maybe not very quickly, but as soon as we stop the flow of toxic fuel, we begin to slowly reverse our damage.

Many of my essays politely ask, (or sometimes, shriek), that we should not be calling it ‘climate change.’ The climate is forever changing, it’s just he cause and scale that are so dramatically different now. “Change” is simply too weak a word for what we now do and for the extremely disastrous heat and storm related consequences.

What I mean about a change in attitude has to do not with our physical world, but our emerging socialized idea of people now realizing what is happening and wanting to influence the possibility of a cleaner, greener world. A change in the social climate is evident. Our values show signs of changing in this new social/political climate.

There is no part of the physical world that is unaffected by inequality, gender, sense of entitlement, or belief in human supremacy over other humans, and the rest of nature. Exploitation, by definition, means some human and natural resources are overwhelmed, yet we continue to provide major subsidies for polluters.

In the large scheme of things, however, it is, after all, a very small minority of people who want a degraded world for the sake of profit, wealth, or temporary jobs. Unfortunately, an outsized effect of what these few want is that the whole planet is worse off.

At some point, (it may be a food loss, or heat wave related die off or enormous, migrant tragedy) people will listen to their own senses, minds, and lives. It’s hard to imagine that we would not collectively want to do the right thing. Even after extreme suffering — things getting worse before they get better — I would still imagine survivors would want peace, stability, collaboration, and healing.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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