BOOK BITS -

The World Without Us

 

 

Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us, writes about our march towards man-made or naturally caused environmental catastrophe:

 

"At what point would things have gone so far that, for all our vaunted superior intelligence, we're not among the hardy survivors? 

 

"The truth is, we don't know. Any conjecture gets muddled by our obstinate reluctance to accept that the worst might actually occur.

 

"We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eaons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright. If those insticts dupe us into waiting until it's too late, thats bad. if they fortify our resistance in the face of mounting omens, that's good. More than once, crazy , stubborn hopee has inspired creative strokes that a snatched people from ruin." - Page 3 of The World Without Us

 

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NORMALCY BIAS  = A mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations.  The assumption is that since a disaster never has occurred then it never will occur.

 

It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

 

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MISSING THE MAIN POINT

 

It is often puzzling to see our generation face ongoing life-threatening disasters in a variety of emotional states that range from helplessness to indifference to unorganized opposition.  If history is evidence enough, we will most likely allow disaster to unfold until its very catastrophic end. 

 

We are wasting precious time and resources fighting skirmishes, sometimes over relatively minor issues, while we neglect the greater ones.

 

For example, we agonize over CO2 but we do nothing about the proliferation of nuclear reactors all over the globe, in spite of the threat that nuclear material represents for ALL life on the planet.  It's not only that they can malfunction and release fatal amounts of radioactivity, but that there is no credible way to deal with nuclear waste.

 

We demand faster and faster computers, but we are way behind in the development of efficient devices to timely detect large incoming asteroids and to prevent them from impacting earth.