As I write this, Hurricane Gustav is bearing down on the Louisiana coast, having forced nearly 2 million people to evacuate and rattling the nerves of a nation that still remembers the human suffering wrought by Katrina.
The threat is immediate. Anybody can see the massive vortex of wind and rain spinning its way toward the coast. Everyone knows that as it makes landfall, the storm will bring immediate destruction.
By now we all know the look of someone who has lost everything to a natural disaster. Television has taken care of that. We have seen the faces of those who found themselves in harm’s way. We feel a touch of their pain in the aftermath.
And in the case of Gustav, many people still feel a sense of moral outrage at the lack of government response following Katrina.
Triggering alarm
In short, Gustav has all the ingredients for triggering alarm. We humans are hard wired to respond to threats like Gustav. It is part of our evolutionary makeup.
Psychologist and book author Dan Gilbert, speaking at Pop!Tech 2007, identifies four factors that trigger what he calls cerebral alarm:
- It has a face. We humans are social animals and have an obsession with anything human.
- It violates our moral sensibilities and arouses our visceral emotions.
- It poses a threat now, not in the future.
- It threatens to cause abrupt changes.
Check out the video. It’s about 15 minutes long.
(I found this video on the blog A Few Things Ill Considered in the post Global Warming is Happening Too Slowly)
Changing tide
These cerebral alarm triggers have served us humans well over the last million or so years, giving us a chance to survive extremely difficult circumstances.
But we are no longer the vulnerable biped fending off starvation, predators and enemies on the African savannas. We have become the grand architects of our planet, shaping anything and everything around us.
My post on the danger of shifting baselines addresses one of the four triggers: abrupt change. When people lose track of the original conditions in an environment, the baseline for that environment shifts. People see only the changes since the new baseline. As a result, they fail to see the true magnitude of change. The change is too gradual to notice.
This is consistent with the way our brains are wired to respond. We can recognize and respond to abrupt, absolute changes. If the wind knocks a tree through your roof, you take action.
Slower changes, however, often go undetected. If a warmer climate allows a beetle infestation to spread and destroy large stands of the same tree, it may take years for the magnitude of the change to be recognized.
We humans like to think we’re smarter than we are. We like to think that we’ve somehow transcended the reptilian part of our brain. But as it stands, we have plenty of room for improvement. Only a small part of our brains think about the future. We are still evolving in that regard.
Slow descent
As Gilbert observes in his Pop!Tech talk:
One day at a time we’ve transformed our world into an ecological nightmare that our grandparents would never have tolerated but that for most of us is simply business as usual because each day isn’t drastically different than the one before.
This goes back to what I was writing in my post on shifting baselines. As Gilbert points out, the impurity of our air, water and food has risen dramatically during our lifetimes but we tolerate it.
Our world today, with our bans on eating fish and smog alerts, was the stuff of science fiction 60 or 70 years ago, Gilbert said.
Where’s the horizon?
We still lack cerebral alarms for climate change and other ecological crises. How do you put a human face on them? How do you attribute any one natural disaster to a larger pattern?
Should you even try? Doesn’t that just confuse the issue?
The sense of immediacy is growing. More people and institutions, of all political views, are beginning to agree that the time has come to address climate change.
But, does this mean we’re seeing further into the future or that the point of no return has moved perilously closer?
The blog Climate Progress noted last week that the Brookings Institution, a think tank known for its centrist policies, has joined the call for an immediate response to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It now says that we may have only seven years to begin cutting emissions or face global catastrophe.
Imagine the Brookings Institution saying such a thing four years ago. Who do you blame for the delay? Human nature?
New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin wrote last month in his blog Dot Earth about what he calls “dawdling in the face of looming risks.”
In Are We Stuck With ‘Blah, Blah, Blah, … Bang’?, he quotes David Ropeik, an expert in risk communications:
The very concept of sustainability is predicated on reason…that humans can see the collective harms their behaviors are doing, and, as rational actors, correct those behaviors. But there is overwhelming evidence from all sorts of fields that our behaviors are not so much a product of reason as they are the result of our overpowering animal instinct to survive.
Even the argument that “Behaving the way we are now is destructive, and hurts our chances for survival” is an argument based on reason. It requires individuals to think rationally and act in the name of the greater common good rather than instinctively in their own self-interests. We’re just not programmed that way.
In short, we respond to hurricanes, not the slower unfolding of planetary crises.
Thinking ahead
Clearly we humans can think and plan for the future. We set goals for ourselves all the time and find ways to realize them. But those are individual pursuits that in one way or another enhance our personal survivability. It gets trickier as the goals and objectives expand to include larger numbers of people.
It may be tempting for those of us who do think about these things to pat ourselves on the back for overcoming our primitive nature and thinking ahead to future global problems. But how many of us actually do things now to address those problems?
It gets tricky. Our present needs so often consume us.
How do we change that? Can we change that?
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Photos by Micah A. Ponce, Tidewater Muse, Taras Kalapun















