Last year, I watched perhaps one of the more interesting Poptech videos.
It was of Dan Gilbert, a Harvard professor in psychology, on why we as humans have failed to respond in any meaningful way in the face of Global Warming.
At the time, I wrote a review for it on Crossroads that elicited some comments from a good friend (and GW skeptic) that made me think about a wider picture of Dan’s core argument.
With Shanghai currently experiencing some of the most fantastic weather (23 degrees C), his point that humans are not reacting to global warming are pretty much dead on. That causes aside (for now), that humans have failed to take the personal steps that are going to be required to correct some of the imbalances in our world.
Now, where I want to take this wider, is that global warming aside, we as humans have just come to mismanage about every resource possible and that in the greater context of things, this is the problem.
Sure, global warming is a problem that is environmental in nature, but in the realm of sustainability it is only one issue.
We are seeing huge issue on water and land management in China right now, poor energy demand and resource management, China has become the #1 car market, and so on.
All issue that in many ways are just as important as the “global warming” issue, are actually core reasons for why climate change is occurring, but because we cannot see the impacts of ourselves on these resources, and we are not really thinking critically about those things that are visible, we are still not changing our core behaviors.