{"id":247,"date":"2008-05-20T13:30:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-20T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravenfamily.org\/sam\/?p=247"},"modified":"2008-05-20T13:30:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-20T13:30:00","slug":"warm-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ravenfamily.org\/sam\/2008\/05\/20\/warm-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Warm Words"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last paragraph from the article of the same name in the April edition of The Environmentalist<\/a>, written by Simon Hodgson<\/strong> of Acona<\/a>:<\/p>\n

So which am I in, the optimist tribe or the pessimist? Neither: I’m a fatalist. Problems come (and [global warming] is a big one) and people and societies respond, reorganise and re-invent themselves. Not without pain, and accompanied by major change, I admit. But we live today in a world unrecognisable to people even one hundred years ago. And no global government masterminded the transition — it just happened as billions of ordinary people took trillions of decisions in a system of unimaginable complexity. And here’s the paradox: most environmental campaigns push for orthodoxy. “Believe this!” they say, “Think and act like me. Know what I know and you’ll do what I do.” Wrong. Tackling climate change is going to need all the magnificent diversity of human nature. Even Jeremy Clarkson has a part to play. Long live the tribes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s the first time in a long while I’ve read something that has given me a whiff of potential hope. Not for the reasons you might think. I am of the opinion that ‘free will’ is a moot point. I have been guilty of the anthropic principle: treating humans as somehow something different. Stupid. Damned stupid.<\/p>\n

The human species is yet another of the complex biological mechanisms that exist on this world. Individually humans are greedy, selfish, self-centred, idiotic, superficial and insanely religious. As individuals they are cultural<\/i>. As a species<\/i> they are still biological<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

So there’s still hope. Because survival is an organic imperative. On a species scale I suspect humans can be modelled using the same simple but emergently complex maths that can mimic the massing of starlings or the shoaling of silver jacks.<\/p>\n

Maybe the solution will come from the interplay of tribes. Humans are tribal: humans are strongest on the level of community. At the level of the monkeysphere. Maybe if we quit trying to do things either individually or<\/u> globally and instead play to our strengths, we’ll get somewhere.<\/p>\n

Long live the tribes indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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