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To:    Guardian CiF
Re:    A simple, quite obvious explanation - once you recognise it - for the mess we are in
Date: Wednesday 30 May 07
 
In response to Peter Wilby's "Humanity must recognise our entire way of life is chronically short-termist".

Link to article and thread at The Guardian.

I have a simple - quite obvious, once you recognise it - explanation for the mess we are in, and so well described by Peter Wilby above:
Our entire socio-economic order in rooted in and dependent on humankind's blind, dumb-animal nature and behaviour, which free-market capitalism developed - naturally enough, in view of human origins - to serve and exploit.

The central false assumption we make is embodied (perhaps I should say, "enshrined") in our scientific name: Homo sapiens (wise and rational man). In fact (certainly collectively), we are neither wise nor rational - just very good at rationalizing and justifying things to suit our own personal and particular, short-sighted, dumb-animal self-interests.

This is why we are not facing up to the challenge, not just of climate change, but of the Sustainability Problem in general: because, collectively, we are still totally dominated by our animal nature and behaviour, and are "bound" to be, because the economy we depend on, itself depends on us remaining so.
 
We are caught in a double bind.

I'm not as pessimistic as Peter Wilby, though, because, when you recognise the "root cause" of the Problem, you can also see the direction, at least, in which the solutions lie.

http://www.spaceship-earth.org