Why we don’t care about the environment

11 September 2019 - 05:05A fire burns in the Amazon jungle near Porto Velho, Brazil, September 9 2019. Picture: REUTERS/Bruno Kelly

Watching humanity wielding the Promethean flame to gormandise the Amazon rainforest — one of many activities that make our species something reminiscent of Monty Python’s obese Mr Creosote — I am tempted to think Zeus’s punishment was fair, even clairvoyant. Perhaps Zeus knew that giving man industry was not the gift Prometheus assumed it to be.

Brazilian leaders should therefore not be dismissed when they implore the West to first remove the plank from their own eyes before attending to the forests in another. Yet while the majority of us think of ourselves as generally good and responsible human beings, relatively few of us feel an urgent need to change how we live or to join movements that put pressure on governments to lessen the reliance on fossil fuels. The health of the planet simply fails to activate our moral impulses, or to agitate our moral sensibilities.

Yet the delirium of consumption still blinds us to the ecological hangover that awaits. This is sometimes referred to as “over-discounting the future”, while the eminent philosopher, Hannah Arendt, diagnoses this cognitive quirk as a lack of moral imagination. It means, unfortunately, that even if people started taking the reports of climate scientists seriously, it may not lead to behaviour change.

Environmentalists try to explain to the general populace how serious and how advanced the situation is, and also how hellish the future will look.

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