Guest essay by Eric Worrall
“Focus on systems, not yourself” – According to author Emma Marris, people who are stressed out about their personal carbon footprints need to understand it is not their fault.
How to Stop Freaking Out and Tackle Climate Change
Here’s a five-step plan to deal with the stress and become part of the solution.
By Emma Marris
Jan. 10, 2020Ms. Marris is the author of “Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World.”
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As an environmental writer, I’m often asked for guidance on coping with climate change. I have thoughts. Even better, I have a five-point plan to manage the psychological toll of living with climate change and to become part of the solution.
Step 1: Ditch the shame.
The first step is the key to all the rest. Yes, our daily lives are undoubtedly contributing to climate change. But that’s because the rich and powerful have constructed systems that make it nearly impossible to live lightly on the earth. Our economic systems require most adults to work, and many of us must commute to work in or to cities intentionally designed to favor the automobile. Unsustainable food, clothes and other goods remain cheaper than sustainable alternatives.
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Imagine dense but livable cities veined with public transit and leafy parks, infrastructure humming away to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, fake meat that tastes better than the real thing, species recovering and rewilding the world, the rivers silver with fish, the skies musical with flocking birds.…
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/opinion/sunday/how-to-help-climate-change.html
If you think this advice sounds familiar you are absolutely correct. Emma’s suggestion is very similar to the excuse Extinction Rebellion provided when challenged about the lifestyles of their celebrity anti-flying campaigners.
But Emma takes this reframing a step further – she describes a glorious future of high density cities teaming with wildlife, yet crisscrossed with public transport, which will somehow be possible if we learn to “live lightly on the Earth”.
In the real world, mixing high density public transport with teaming wildlife usually produces lots of roadkill.
Perhaps I am being too harsh. Emma isn’t actually offering an explanation for how her vision might be achieved. Emma has provided the vision; I guess it is now up to engineers and rich people to sort out the implementation details.
“Imagine dense but livable cities veined with public transit and leafy parks, infrastructure humming away to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, fake meat that tastes better than the real thing, species recovering and rewilding the world, the rivers silver with fish, the skies musical with flocking birds.”
I’m sorry, but I like to pride myself on most Beatles songs, but I can’t seem to recall those lyrics from “Lucie in the sky with diamonds”! Anyone know what illicit substance she’s taking & where can I get some? 😉 (Sarc off!)
If these Green zealots, had any idea just how hard it is, living without modern reliable energy availability coupled with modern efficient food production and distribution, they would stop being so ignorant and stop being so stupid.
I have experienced life without electricity, without oil or gas, and without any running water in the woodland hut I was born in, and lived in with my three siblings for the first six years of my life. Water was bucketed from the stream that ran along the boundary of our little woodland abode. The only nod to modernity was a battery powered radio. No motor car no motor bike, no mechanical assistance of any sort, beyond a bicycle. Lighting by paraffin lamp or candle, bed at sundown.
It was hard, it was character forming and it made me aware of just how difficult life is without help from others.
Message to Ms Emma Marris, Been there done that, take it from me, it is the closest thing to impossible you could imagine, no sane person would want to do it, or advocate it.
The name of the place is Utopia. It will go the same way as all other utopias: into the dustbin of history.
Anthony,
I don’t know if this has been done before but as this lady is making a list I got to thinking about what I like about being a sceptic and would appreciate your readers help in compiling all their reasons and adding them to mine.
I will start with a few of my own reasons and hope others will add to them.
1. History is on my side
2. I can laugh at the super sensitive anxious bedwetting alarmists
3. I can have a guiltless sense of humour.
4. I don’t have to have an opinion
5. I don’t have to take a position on an issue
6. I can change my mind based on available facts
7. I am not stressed
8. I don’t need an attitude adjustment
9. I can buy shares in profitable companies that truely help the world to be a better place
10. I can fly around the world without guilt knowing that my expenditure will be used to give someone else a real job and some will be spent on technical advances in numerous fields of endeavour.
11. I sleep well because I am relaxed
12. My grain crops are producing more that ever before because of higher CO2 making my future more secure
13. My increased crop production because of the extra availability of CO2 is providing great quality grain for export thereby reducing starvation.
14. I have the ability to identify BS on the ABC (I now call it the “Panic Station”)
15. I do not have TDS, JDS or MDS. (Trump, Johnson & Morrison)
16. The vast majority of my peer group and even the next generation are of a similar mind but none of us say it out loud.
17…………..? More please.
Over to others.
Regards
Brian.
17. I can buy and install solar PV if it will save me money.
18. I can see minus 34 celcius outside and not wish it was colder and snow drifts up to the power lines.
“Imagine dense but livable cities veined with public transit and leafy parks….” The “rich and powerful” have “veined” our town with bicycle lanes on the side of roads. The area around the university is littered with them. I have never, ever, seen anyone on them. Ever.
Imagine dense but livable cities veined with public transit and leafy parks, infrastructure humming away to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, fake meat that tastes better than the real thing, species recovering and rewilding the world, the rivers silver with fish, the skies musical with flocking birds
Well her imaginary utopia must not be powered by wind (bird choppers) or solar (bird friers) otherwise the skies would be silent. Can’t be Hydro, as that would interfere with the “rivers silver with fish”, It can’t be nuclear either, as Nuclear doesn’t emit CO2, so there’d be no need for ” infrastructure humming away to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere”, so her imaginary utopia must be powered by fossil fuels. Imagine that!
I say give them what they want.
Turn of the energy aka electricity natural gas oil etc. Ya know all those evil things that are keeping them alive in them big cities
Betcha by Feb. most of them will shut up.
There is nothing stopping grown-ups concerned about 1degC warming since Wyatt Earp was sheriff of Dodge City to make decisions to reduce their *carbon footprint*, but of all the green people I now, just 1 rides a pushbike to work, 1 has an electric car and 1 family has gone off the grid. The rest seem to think the government can control the climate; well they can support Pocahontas, who wants to ban construction of new buildings, but why don’t climate candidates go the full Greta and threaten to ban air travel, etc? Wouldn’t that go down well with the hypocrites!
Who needs five steps?
You have two choices.
1. Take a deep breath. Never exhale. Your stress will end shortly.
2. Take a deep breath. Slowly exhale. Be glad you’re alive.
In her “Imagine” Utopia I saw no mention of farms to grow the food to feed the densely packed sardines with their “leafy parks”.
Will people be eating their chia pets?
(I seriously doubt that a “chia cow” tastes better than the real thing.)
High Priestess Emma Marris is offering all you “stressed-out” eco-zombies … religious absolution. So long as you confess your sins against Gaia … you will be … “forgiven”.
Nooooo ooo … CAGW is NOT a religion. Nope. Not at all.
Yeah. Okay. I have yet to meet a human being in my 67 years who actually did admit guilt for a sin he or she had committed. When somebody says, “I feel guilty,” he or she is actually saying, admire me for my exquisite sense of personal responsibility. And they are always “guilty” about something for which no reasonable person would blame them in the first place. Ask them to feel guilty about something they’ve really done (and might therefore deserve punishment) and they will tell you that that wasn’t their fault. (Stephen Harper, for example, wishes to apologize for the residential schools, but not for sending Canadian soldiers to die for nothing in Afghanistan.)
I don’t feel guilty about climate change because I didn’t do it. Neither did anybody else, because no, human beings don’t have any appreciable influence on the climate. The insects probably have more to do with the maintenance of life on Earth than we do.
Probably wasn’t the best idea to put both those paragraphs in the same post, Ian, as it makes you look like you, in the second paragraph, are engaging in the behavior you described in the first (even though, in the second you aren’t “shifting blame” as per the first paragraph, but rather pointing out a simple truth).