Discuss: How to Be a Climate Hero

Just reading all that you are doing gives me more hope.

We all have to keep leading by our behavior and hoping to get others to change.

I’ve always been a worrier, and I don’t know about everyone else, but that’s probably one reason I am so concerned about this issue, the motherload of all ‘worries.’

Yet I see it as a good thing, it motivates me, I do everything I know how to limit my footprint, and I normalize it into my life.  And then it rubs off.  It becomes more normal to everyone I know, who see that BIG changes are possible.  I think Audrey’s right, the bystander effect may be at work, but we are social beings who are influenced by the cultural behaviors around us.  Show everyone around you a different behavior, another aspect of our humanity, and the mammoth scale will slowly but surely begin to tip the other way.

What is happening here needs to be occurring now.

Thanks for your many wonderful comments, other efforts and for this opportunity to communicate openly about what to me looks like the proverbial “mother” of all global challenges: the human overpopulation of Earth in our time.

It looks like humankind inhabits a tiny celestial orb that is miraculously set among of sea of stars. As far as we know, life as we know it exists nowhere else in the Universe. In the light of these one-of-a-kind circumstances, perhaps we of the human family have the responsibility of assuring the security for the future of life in our planetary home.

I am trying to focus attention on the pressing need for human beings to protect and preserve the finite resources of Earth and its frangible ecosystems. If we fail to achieve this goal, then an unimaginably bleak future could await our children. In all the seriousness of what could be somehow true, I mean the children of my generation.

If 6+ billion human beings live on Earth now and 9+ billion are expected to populate our small planet by 2050, then the human species simply cannot keep engaging in certain unbridled activities that we can see overspreading the Earth because the Earth has limited resources upon which all forms of life and human constructions like national economies utterly depend for existence. Without adequate resources and ecosystem system services of Earth, life as we know it and human institutions could collapse, I suppose.

Now, some portion of the world’s human population conspicuously over-consumes the resources of our planetary home. Other people, working in huge multinational conglomerations, are operating businesses in a way that recklessly scours the oceans’ floor, decapitates mountains, turns biomass into human mass and, in these and many other ways, end up dissipating natural resources at such an alarming rate that the Earth has insufficient time to restore the resources for human benefit. Still other people in the family of humanity are overpopulating the planet. The leviathan-like scale and rapid growth of global human consumption, production and propagation activities are putting the Earth, life as we know it, and the human community in grave, clear and present danger.

Elder human beings of the overdeveloped world, of whom I am one, are among the people in our planetary home who are ravenously over-consuming Earth’s resources. We could choose to consume less. People in the developing could choose to limit overproduction of unnecessary things, to stop ravaging the planet, and to contain industrial pollution. People in the underdeveloped world could limit their number of offspring. Perhaps these are some ways the family of humanity begins to respond ably to the human-induced global challenges that loom so ominously before humanity in our time.

While I certainly agree that action should have been taken by my generation of old folks when we were young in the 60s and 70s, when we became aware of the “population bomb,” still we have responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, here and now, for the sake of our children, grandchildren and coming generations.

The idea of making a conscious choice to do nothing in the face of the recognizably daunting global challenges that are visible before humanity on the far horizon is anathema to me.

At a minimum, do we not have a “duty to warn” others of the potential for some kind of ecological catastrophe if the human community adamantly chooses to continue relentlessly down the current “primrose path” marked by soon to become unsustainable consumption, production and propagation activities now overspreading the surface of Earth?

Always with thanks,

Steve

i’m split. if i succeed, and help my nearest dearest people succeed, according to strict standards, i feel good, but if wider society misses critical environmental targets, did i also fail? not that i’m responsible for others’ choices, but i do have to live with OUR consequences.

i think we need to watch carefully and draw out the best in people who are at the center of activity, since we are under very tight conditions now, all around the world, very fault intolerant as the food and fuel inflation shows. to me this means we must be irreverent as we are strict, bold as we are wary, loving as we are merciless.

Wow! Excellent! For my documentary I’ve been looking into psychological explanations of climate change denial, and reading this was an aha moment.

Dave Gardner
Producer/Director
Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity
[url=http://www.growthbusters.com]http://www.growthbusters.com[/url]

(that’s dangerous—the earth isn’t a person, the epilepsy isn’t neatly separable—noticing that someone is dying and you need to help them is different from noticing that your important tools of life are causing other people harm—there’s a lot of “how do we prevent recidivism” that needs doing—basic mitigation of social pressure to seek individual gain—help the junkies get clean and stay clean—“how do we change the economy so harm is difficult")

You can read more about bystander Effect.  Once you know about it, you are less likely to be frozen by it. 

If I remember correctly, the researchers of the Bystander Effect looked into who did react.  They found there are four stages you need to move through to act.  1 - recognize something is going wrong.  2 - take responsibility.  3 - identify an appropriate reaction.  4 - do it.

I think the US is on Step 1 and wrestling with Steps 2 and 3.  The good news is the rest of the world is mostly on Step 4 and waiting impatiently.

The other thing the researchers found is that the more often you go through these 4 steps to react in an emergency, the more likely you are to do it quickly and efficiently the next time you see something bad happen.  With this global emergency, we could be creating the world’s greatest generation of activists.

After 9/11/01 I was a bystander for a while until I decided that our need for oil was part of the problem. I challenged myself to come up with a way to get our energy a different way. My research showed that the ultimate fuel is hydrogen, but the problem is how to get it without creating more CO2. The usual method is steam reforming which produces 5.5 pounds of CO2 for each pound of hydrogen. Electrolyzing of water with wind energy is the best. So I developed the http://www.Windhunter.org site to show a better way. I also installed 29 compact bulbs and traded my 2000 Buick for a Prius.