Moral philosopher Henry Shue argues that we should think of our generation’s climate responsibility like the World War II generation’s duty to stop fascism. We were born into a critical historical moment and have an obligation to act.
100%. I had a long talk with my parents the other day. The boomers have a mix of denial of facts, denial of severity, and denial of actionable efforts. Breaking down these denials is tough, especially with every article saying “this will get worse with climate change, but there’s no way to tell if this event specifically was caused by climate change” as if things getting more frequent isn’t causal enough. But I share their denial of actionable efforts, the political system will not stop using oil. People are too brainwashed, self interested, etc to even vote for that, even if voting worked. In all honesty I’ve become a bit of a prepper. I believe in reincarnation, and believe that this will personally effect me, but even if you don’t I can’t imagine what our children will suffer through, for the rest of humanities future too. It’s heart breaking how human greed and stupidity caused this, and how the intellectual among us can only warn and watch.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently but I don’t really know what to concretely do. I considered joining Extinction Rebellion or something but I don’t really agree with their methods.
The route I’ve been mostly considering was starting something at my university and try and get the university board or whatever to actually take climate change seriously but I have my doubts on that working.
Does anyone have some suggestions on concrete actions one can take ?
Amazing how we are the generation that needs to do everything. We are already the last generation with no ability to kick the can on so many issues that have piled up.
It is so annoying that even the issues other generations claim to have solved are still front and center today because nothing was solved. Hell, we can’t even get accurate teaching into schools. I was floored to hear a teacher giving a lecture on Christopher Columbus discovering America recently. Like, no, we know that isn’t true and we know the reason we learned it was to stop racial pregidious against Italians. Why can’t we teach that to kids instead of telling lies and leaving another generation to find out the truth on their own?
People are stupid.