From "Don't Look Up" to Greta Thunberg videos to doomsaying memes, we are awash in warnings that we are almost out of time. But the climate crisis is outpacing our emotional capacity to describe it.
...Perhaps one of the many creature comforts we must abandon to address global warming is the anesthetizing stream of global warming content itself. As David Wallace-Wells writes in his 2019 book "The Uninhabitable Earth," climate-themed disaster films do not necessarily represent progress, as "we are displacing our anxieties about global warming by restaging them in theaters of our own design and control." Even YouTube videos of climate conferences can slip into this role. As we frame an activist like Thunberg as a kind of celebrity oracle, we transfer our own responsibilities onto a teenager with a preternatural command of dismal statistics. We once said that we would stop climate change for the benefit of our children, but now we can tell ourselves that our children will take care of it for us...
Amanda Hess
...Perhaps one of the many creature comforts we must abandon to address global warming is the anesthetizing stream of global warming content itself. As David Wallace-Wells writes in his 2019 book "The Uninhabitable Earth," climate-themed disaster films do not necessarily represent progress, as "we are displacing our anxieties about global warming by restaging them in theaters of our own design and control." Even YouTube videos of climate conferences can slip into this role. As we frame an activist like Thunberg as a kind of celebrity oracle, we transfer our own responsibilities onto a teenager with a preternatural command of dismal statistics. We once said that we would stop climate change for the benefit of our children, but now we can tell ourselves that our children will take care of it for us...
Amanda Hess
I thinking when I saw Don't Look Up the very same thing that this article expresses. It seems as though we believe that we are supporting a cause so long as we agree with the media and personalities that express support of that cause. But pushing for change is more than watching a movie, or responding to a blog post for that matter.
ReplyDeleteI agree. Don't look up was the perfect example. Scientific facts will be told and somehow change is still not seen.
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