Charles Stross' Diary (RSS Feed)
02-03-2008, 01:00 PM
Over on bad science blog Depleted Cranium (http://depletedcranium.com/), we have a fun essay titled The Top Ten Things Environmentalists Need to Learn (http://depletedcranium.com/?p=368).
I can't commend this piece too highly. Expecting everyone to dump their standard of living in the shitter in order to save the environment is not a realistic strategy because humans don't work that way: it'd require the equivalent of a mass religious conversion, and we have a technical term for periods of history that involve mass religious conversions: we call them interesting. (Usually from a remove of several centuries.) If you really want to know how humans work, in the mass, you need to look to economics; and if you want to effect positive environmental change, you need to figure out how to make people want it.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: the modern environmentalist movement is a puritan religious movement in secular drag. But that doesn't mean that fixing our environmental problems isn't a good idea. Nor are we going to get there by wearing sackcloth and ashes, mortifying the flesh, and trying to live like mediaeval subsistence-farming peasants. Read this article (http://depletedcranium.com/?p=368). Then start thinking.
(Original Post) (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/02/common_sense_alert.html)
I can't commend this piece too highly. Expecting everyone to dump their standard of living in the shitter in order to save the environment is not a realistic strategy because humans don't work that way: it'd require the equivalent of a mass religious conversion, and we have a technical term for periods of history that involve mass religious conversions: we call them interesting. (Usually from a remove of several centuries.) If you really want to know how humans work, in the mass, you need to look to economics; and if you want to effect positive environmental change, you need to figure out how to make people want it.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: the modern environmentalist movement is a puritan religious movement in secular drag. But that doesn't mean that fixing our environmental problems isn't a good idea. Nor are we going to get there by wearing sackcloth and ashes, mortifying the flesh, and trying to live like mediaeval subsistence-farming peasants. Read this article (http://depletedcranium.com/?p=368). Then start thinking.
(Original Post) (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/02/common_sense_alert.html)