In the article, "Maybe no one cares about climate change because we're wired for extinction", George Black reports on a thesis written by psychologist Andrew Shatte, who basically states that humans are hardwired for extinction. How? Shatte parallels humans to the Irish Elk, which became extinct about 110 centuries ago. Comparable to modern day elk, the males had huge antlers to assert dominance as well as to attract mates. However, the antlers these massive beasts carried were abnormally large, and would hinder their ability to easily navigate in its surroundings, thus causing them to starve to death, or eventually ate away at the Elk's calcium since they were unable to eat enough calories to nourish the growth of their antlers. So why are we like the Irish elk? Shatte states that the human brain development is behind and fails to change with the issues in our world. This causes us to fear the same things humans feared years and years ago, such as sharks or snakes. Black then goes on to state that Americans have the least amount of concern when compared to other developed countries when it comes to the crisis of the environment due to human destruction. His speculation for this is that there are a great number of conservative states in our country, and since they are generally anti-science, they completely ignore and retaliate against any government attempt to control carbon emissions. But the question still poses, why are Americans the least concerned for the environmental crisis? Eileen Claussen* states that the United States is the only country in the developed world that has a major political party who turns a blind eye to the scientific community. It is so discouraging to see political parties in America disagree on something that seems so common sense: preserving the world in any way possible, even if it's something as simple as recycling.I personally feel that the Republican's refusal to acknowledge that the climate crisis is a tremendous matter which needs immediate attention has a lot to do with the fundamental detached thinking of Americans - that we can control nature to fit our demands as we see fit. In Aldo Leopold's writing, "Thinking Like a Mountain", he describes how he finds a wolf and a pack of her pups and kills her because it was convention to kill a wolf upon sight. He then depicts the "fierce green fire" in her eyes vanish as she was dying. In the eyes of hunters, fewer wolves meant more deer to hunt; in the eyes of farmers, fewer wolves meant less predators to prey upon their stock. However, as Leopold witnesses the "wolfless mountain and [saw] the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails" (Leopold, page 2), he sees that a mountain without wolves was not the hunter's paradise he had envisioned. Instead, lay a desolate, rock-barren mountain overrun with starving deer. He states that we have not learned to think like a mountain, because we fail to foresee what damage may come when humans upset the perfect balance of mother nature. In this way, we continue to ignore the problems that occur from our actions. We seem to see nature as an expendable resource, and absorb everything we can from an area until we have annihilated everything. What happens then, when we have nothing left to destroy?
Author of this post:
Mika Earling
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*Eileen Claussen is the president of the Pew Center of Global Climate Change
