One vital and underapplied part of how we’re gonna beat climate change is learning and teaching mental coping skills.
Letting ourselves be wholly aware of the full severity of the situation while also juggling the even more important, and seemingly contradictory, flame of committing to fix, improve, prevent, mitigate, and/or adapt to the situation is a pretty big ask that I can’t take for granted. I can’t assume that everyone already knows how to do that.
So many can’t. They either steer way clear of the abyss or they fall in. They haven’t been taught to make a enough of a security fence around it to know where it is and be able to look at it or even navigate it.
You’ve got to learn it. I can do my best to try to come up with ways to convey it, whether that’s GTD or just sitting, and others can pick up that baton too, and we can all help each other learn it, but I’m gonna lay out the case for why there are no alternatives to that ask, to learning to juggle those two flames.
People in power absolutely need to. A lack of these two skills lead to compartmentalization and making excuses which leads to the denialism and delayism we see rampant in policy-making today.
And who has power? While it’s true that we ordinary citizens are incredibly powerless and helpless and subjected to the whims of policy and ruthless megacorporations, it’s also apparent that we’re not using the little power we do have. It’s apparent from the extent fools get votes. The green parties here in Europe have like one twentieth of the votes. In the US, they have a two party system—they just do, mathematically—but even in a two-party system when it’s the worst of the two that’s in power, that’s at least partly on the voting public. Electoral college or no, there are millions of people who did vote for him, and who vote for the denialist or delayist parties here in Europe.
And as long as that’s the case, it’s clear that we the people collectively could do more. A huge part of where we can do better is media and education. Journalists keep falling for and parroting the fossil fuel industry’s denialisms.
To the extent people are even watching traditional journalism… That’s part of the problem, too. We in the ancom left pushed for a decentralization and samizdatification of sources of truth, and I say we because I’m absolutely complicit in that, too, but the far right has managed to capitalize on that and spread their lies rhizomatically and virally to a greater extent than we the truth.
That structure is not working out for us.
Speaking of ancom… Some of y’all might be thinking “Voting, policy makers? What happened to your newfound enthusiasm for ancom? I knew it! She’s back to her old the state will fix it ways!” Not really. If you wanna smash the corporate fossil infrastructure then that’s awesome. Or if your revolution is building a new world of giving and sharing, I’m still in if you are. That’s not gonna be enough, but it’d still be a good thing.
We’ve got to put the kibosh on those corporations one way or the other. That means smashing them and/or regulating them through policy and legislation. They’re not gonna fix themselves. Corporate action is legally mandated to exploit climate destruction to the fullest extent of what’s legal so the “what’s legal” part is pretty important. Hence me talking about politicians here.