Climate change and human imagination

Countries heavily dependent on agriculture face risk of conflict and civil unrest because of climate-caused problems

Primitive human beings such as Neanderthals did not have the ability to imagine unseen things. They could not understand fiction or what is generally regarded as gossip. Then came the cognitive revolution giving humans the ability to imagine things. That was around 70,000 years ago. There would have been no religion, government, constitution, and so forth if we did not have the ability to imagine the unseen and the unproven.

Think of corporations. They are what lawyers call “legal fiction” because they are created out of thin air. One cannot point to them. Yet, they enjoy existence, rights, and power. In America, they enjoy more rights than humans, thanks to the outlandish interpretation of the 13^th Amendment to the US Constitution. While corporations encourage entrepreneurship, they nevertheless, might lead us to extinction because of their lust for profits.

In primitive humans, the change in behaviour was dictated by the environment instead of by the power of imagination. They moved from one place to another because of the availability of game not because they planned where to harvest their crop and how they’d be reaping the produce coming spring. Today, we buy land or stock, imagining that when its price goes up, we would turn a profit. One nation invades another believing a regime change or stealing of the oil would lead to benefits for the invading nation.

Despite the cognitive revolution giving us our proud intelligence, it seems to me, those primitive humans were smarter than us. Take a look at climate change. Our climate is being destroyed right in front us and we are merely awaiting the coming of apocalypse, which may not be too far away. We have the cognitive ability to imagine the disaster ahead as well as see the environmental effects right now, yet, we are not changing our behaviour. Ever more fossil fuel is being burnt. It is as if all our senses are asleep. The wildfires and floods only register a tiny blip on our radar.

Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was forced to resign because she attempted to honour the Paris Agreement. In 2018, the world’s highest temperature ever recorded in April was in Pakistan. India and Pakistan would be hurt more by a warming world than America and England. Just the air conditioning units alone in Pakistan and India are adding enormous amounts of carbon to the atmosphere.

A 2016 study concluded that from 1980 till 2010, in the world’s ethnically diverse countries, 23% of the conflict was initiated in the months marked by weather disaster. Countries heavily dependent on farming and agriculture face “extreme risk” of conflict and civil unrest because of climate-caused problems.

I also want to warn here that we should not settle for this therapeutic belief that oil corporations are responsible for this and someone in power needs to do something about all this mess. Every time we turn on a light, we add our footprint to climate change because the entire power generating infrastructure is powered by fossil fuel burning. Driving a Tesla wouldn’t cut it either because the car has to be charged and that electricity is generated by fossil fuel-burning plants. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Radical changes must be brought in how we generate power and how we consume it.

But talk is cheap. While typing this article on a computer run by the same dirty electricity, I am sitting in an air-conditioned room, which is adding to the warming outside. I have an iPhone, which is made where most of the world’s carbon emissions happen. I survived two hurricanes in Texas in the last three weeks while watching wildfires in the American West Coast burning up over five million acres of land. We only have a few years to change direction. It wouldn’t matter how radical changes we bring in the year 2080.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, Septe0mber 28^th, 2020.

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