Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Even climate activists like Joe Romm and Daniel Smith and Glenn Albrecht are in climate denial

New York Times comments are now closed, but I submitted this to Daniel B Smith's very good article about solastalgia:

re this specific comment No. 73 by DAVID of CAPE TOWN SOUTH AFRICA

"Daniel Smith's implicit assumption in the article seems to be that the move to a ever more industrialised, technological future is inevitable and desirable and unavoidable, but that somehow we can turn to psychology to game our way past the mental dis-ease that will increasingly overtake us as we over-develop and destroy our environment.

I suspect he is wrong, and that there will be no way, other than a deep "green" future, to restore our deep mental health.

It seems to me, for example, that there are different orders of "climate change denialism", and that those who acknowledge climate change yet imagine that it is a problem that can be resolved through deploying new technologies are simply on a different part of the "denial" spectrum elsewhere occupied by those who refuse to acknowledge even the existence of human-induced climate change.

I write as a one-time technological utopian," he wrote.

DANNY BLOOM COMMENTS HERE:

All these comments, above, I say this to Daniel B. Smith, and the editorial comments mod
team at the Times,
is what some pundits now call an After-Article. It's a new journalism term
coined for the comments that now often follow a published news article
on a snailpaper's website such as above. here.


In the old days, 1850 to 1999, before After-Articles became common, a
news article or feature story would appear in, say, the New York Times
or the LA Times or the Boston Globe or the Guardian in London, and if
a reader wanted to contact the author of the article or the editor of
the newspaper to comment on the story pro or con, he or she had to
write a letter and send it in by snailmail or email and wait for a
response. Most letters never received a reply or a response. Sometimes
the author did reply. It took weeks, months.


Fast foward to 2010. Now many news articles and opeds and feature
stories -- longform journalism -- in the New York Times and other
snailpapers have a comment section following the online publication of
the story and readers can write in immediately and voice their
opinions or make their feelings known one way or another, pro or con.
Some comment sections print 10 - 25 comments, some as many as 500 or
800.


And reading the comment sections -- what I now call THE AFTER-ARTICLE
-- often is more interesting and enlightening and rewarding to the
reader than the original article. Or as interesting. Or both combined
make up a new kind of reading experience. So a new term is born.

That said, and having read all the comments above by printing them out
on paper -- the only way to read, IMHO -- on paper surfaces, this
screen reading is for the birds -- after reading the comments i can
only conclude that everyone here, more or less, is in denial about
climate chaos coming out way in the distant future. Even Dan Smith is
in denial, even Dr Albrecht is in denial, all the therapists
interviewed for the article are in denial, and most comments here too
are in denial. You still think there is a fix. In fact, there is not
fix. No engingeering fix, no geoengineering fix, no technologcail fix,
humankind is coming to a major impasse, and billions will die in a
series of massive die-offs in the next 500 years -- not now -- and
about 200,000 remnants of humankind will make it to polar cities in
Alaska and New Zealand to serve as breeding pairs to keep the human
species alive, and later, maybe year 10,000 AD, these remnants will
repopulate the Earth when the climate clears again. This is the
direction we are headed in. I am not in denial. I completely accept
this fate for humankind. Those who do not accept this, you are in
denial. you want life to continue as is, therapy sessions and all. get
over it. we are headed to a place where Mad Max meets The Road.
prepare.

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