It’s Time To Take A New Look At Climate Activism︱Events
By Jack On Reality
Netflix’s new nature docuseries, Life On Our Planet, uses CGI and present-day observations to create a picture of Earth’s history. It’s a pretty refreshing and unique installment of a generic genre. But there is one thing it has in common with its siblings: it warns of climate change with as much enthusiasm as Paul Revere had when he shouted, “the British are coming!” As a quick disclaimer, I completely agree that humans are horrible, and that we are consuming vast amounts of resources at dangerous rates, and that we are the main participants in a severe global warming. However, I have a few problems with how climate change activism is carried out. For one thing, it injects extreme fear into the younger generations. For another, it is full of holes. And finally, it is powered by a hubris unique to the human species. All of these problems are completely overlooked by most people, who tend to mindlessly follow climate activists, and treat them as deities, perfect beings. This is wrong. Very wrong.
Many people are worried that kids these days are pretty depressed. Britain, among other countries, has appointed a Minister for Loneliness, for goodness’ sake. But then the same people scare their children with the old, “you’re going to be the ones to change things” lecture. Constantly, kids are hearing doomsday stories about an apocalypse caused by global warming. The future generations will be so scarred by these horror stories that it’ll be hard for them to save anything at all.
Also, Life On Our Planet taught me a few things about our evolution. The way I see it, we could either have chosen to use our brains and opposable thumbs for survival, and in so doing create the world we live in today, or we could have remained in the middle of the food chain. All this infrastructure, these cars and factories, are crucial to our survival, our dominance over other species. I know that climate activists would rather live in this smoky 2024 than the alternate 2024, in which they are running from a tiger.
Furthermore, who’s to say that we would never have gone extinct anyway? There were five mass extinctions, so arguably a sixth was inevitable. We are just speeding the process of life up. One might say we are getting the pain over with. Yes, we did disrupt nature’s process. But what if, by intervening again, and postponing the next extinction, we make the future worse than it already is? Just something for activists to think about before they go to bed.
Finally, climate activism is so very hubristic. It is based on the idea, no, the hope, that we can control anything. We are not certain that we can stop climate change. We cannot stop ourselves from drinking, or arming others. How can we stop the direction nature is heading in? Activists’ solutions are vague and cannot cover the massive scope of global warming. They are spending their lives working furiously towards a goal that does not exist. All in all, don’t believe everything you hear from climate activists.
