A Look at Change - How and Why?

How can or will we change to solve the climate problem?

It is assumed for the purpose of this writing that in order to stop and reverse the damage that the "Western" standard of living has caused, those people who enjoy certain costly comforts will be required to either change the source of those comforts, or entirely sacrifice them.

Over the course of history, several major events have happened that have changed the way people (of various populations and cultures) have lived their lives- for better or for worse.

In order to understand the ways these events have changed the lives of those they affected, and to understand how a similar event may change the way we live in such a way that it benefits the world, I'm going to split these important events into two very broad categories.

The first category is proactive movements. These are movements that were brought about when a population or government sensed  inevitable hardship or an opportunity, or a technology revolutionized an industry and changed the way people lived.

The second category is reactive movements. This is pretty self-explanatory. Populations or governments are forced to react to the situation in which they find themselves, or to deal with the aftermath of something that was imposed upon them, for better or worse.

Neither of these broad groups inherently implies positivity or negativity- populations change in positive and negative ways for positive and negative reasons (or it can be thought of as ‘due to positive or negative stressors’).

The first entry will be a brief look back on specific historical events that served as a catalyst for change, because I firmly believe that the process of covering our (carbon) footprint(s) and existing in such a way that doesn’t directly harm our planet will require a drastic change and/or a complete abandonment of many modern comforts - in other words, the same kind of change will need to occur as has occurred from the following events.

Reactive Events

Like I mentioned earlier, these changes are all about retrospection and adaptation. I’m also starting with these because it’s easier to view these events in a negative light- a sort of “learning from your mistakes” kind of attitude. Nobody likes taking your medicine, but we all eventually heal. Looking to reactive events may organically bring about the notion that some type of tragedy must occur for change to take place. While this may not be necessarily true, it’s hard to deny that a climate change related tragedy of a scale we’ve never seen could catalyze the right kind of change in people and/or governments.

One of the most translatable incidents happened the morning of 11 September, 2001, when Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked 4 planes, flew one into the Pentagon and two into the World Trade Center. 2,996 lives, over 6,000 injured, and an estimated $3 trillion (!) in total costs.

This event led to many changes not just in the U.S., but in how the whole world viewed international security. The “Post 9/11 World” is very much tangibly different for reasons familiar to most; security within airplanes is much tighter, with sealing and locking cockpit doors that have strict guidelines; airport security completely unrecognizable from the ‘90s- most airports have anywhere from 2-3 security checkpoints (like Nashville), and some airports have upwards of 6 checkpoints of various intensity (Frankfurt).

Perhaps the farthest-reaching effect of the 9/11 attacks was the sheer fear and sense of mortality it gave hundreds of millions of Americans, and many more than that all around the world. An attack of that magnitude on their home was something extremely foreign to Americans at the time. The grieving went further than the thousands of families that lost a loved one- the nation grieved for the loss of its innocent and sense of innocence.

This loss of innocence is, I think, the gem we can recover from the ashes of that (and other) tragedies in much the same way that people experience hardship and personal tragedy and turn those into an opportunity to build character.
Humanity quickly learned a lesson in the harshest way possible, but I’d like to believe that the world (at least the first-world) is a better, safer place because of that hard lesson.

I would absolutely love to be proven wrong about this estimate, but I have maintained from the beginning of the semester that the most likely path to real, unified change to reduce carbon emissions and, in turn, climate change is through real tragedy- likely involving a significant loss of life.

As we’ve often discussed in class, people are notoriously bad at long-term planning, and planning on the scale of 100 years is extremely rare. Humanity as a whole hasn’t quite “felt” the pressure of climate change. They as a whole have not been faced with their mortality as a result of climate change. As the past few decades have shown us, academic papers and bleached reefs have not done enough to convince humans that they risk their very existence by continuing on the way they do.

Whether this very negative outlook entails a Pacific island being swallowed, a hurricane wiping out the East coast, or even just a change in our diet, I haven’t quite decided and one can only hope that the most mild jolt with the right context will wake up the masses to the incredibly real and ever-present threat to their existence.

My second entry (after the weight of most of my finals has been lifted) will cover one more “reactive movement," move into a few examples of the proactive, and come with much more formatting.

Sorry for the wall of text!

Word count so far: 955