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Climate change and Nihilism

cacaia

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Hello, all. I've been called a "person with Nihilistic thoughts" by some both here at the forum and in my family.
One of my sisters is a climate change activist, which I think it's honorable- to a certain degree. The way she goes about it is very preachy and uninspiring. It's more of a guilt trip, really.
Anytime you try to point out something positive or hopeful, she hits you with a "if we don't make climate change an emergency, and if you don't come with me to this, that, and that rally, you are an evil person".
I have explained my view to her, and she is absolutely flustered by it.
My view is this- we are not the first, nor the last, species headed toward extinction to happen here on earth. I believe there were a total of 6 mass extinctions on earth, and we are just part of that cycle. Also, humans knew for years they were affecting the planet and making climate change accelerate at breakneck speeds, and the entire human race, despite many individual's efforts, have failed to do anything about it. Now, in this critical moment, people are either just going about their business or freaking out about extinction.
I say, humans, as fascinating and wonderful as they are, are also leeches upon the earth- parasites that consume all they can and consume some more, and destroy plants, animals, etc with no mercy. I don't think it's worth it- I say let nature run its course.
And a part of me wonders- Is this nihilism even good? Why am I not freaking out like my sister? Why do I just shrug, knowing my whole world, myself, those I love, may perish and be extinct?
What are your own thoughts on climate change and the future of humankind as well as other species?
 

Red Memories

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I never fathom nihilist. I wouldn't say I am like your sister, a raving activist of any sort, but the idea that nothing in our life really has meaning or value...

why do you even choose to continue to exist then? Like...nihilism...if I was a nihilist I would have long killed myself. Humans often actually are leeches, and shitty, and all around make you just bang your head in disappointment. If this world has no meaning, if nothing we do means anything, why live? I don't find nihilism even...healthy I guess. Unfathomable, at the least. To me it sounds like chronic depression, a hot desert, a world where we only eat plain bread without butter. I am also fairly religious so I have this sort of strong belief in morality too so...

I believe we should just care about earth, climate change or not, because God formed everything, and He intended for it to be cared for.
 

cascadeco

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I would be content to 'let nature run its course' if all humans were wiped off the planet. Then nature (minus us ravagers and plunderers - and yes, I'm aware certain people will feel the need to emphasize that we are part of nature too) would indeed run its course free from our tyranny.

I want to cry when I think of it. I am periodically on my facebook feed getting notices of various birds or snails now extinct or virtually extinct, and it will only continue. I got one the other day about a bird in Florida, and I thought to myself, welp, not sure I'll be able to get myself to Florida to see that beautiful little guy before he has ceased to exist.

Oh sure, our ecosystem today is the result of millions of previous extinctions, but at least we can know nature did play out. (Though I would still *grieve* for the vanishings) Now? Bah. Pretty much no one cares about anything but their own comforts - in terms of the global culture. If people continue to put up a stink about the 'inconvenience' of lack of disposable cups or not being able to do or go some such place because it might harm something else that actually exists (gasp) or any number of small life changes, then people really don't give two shits when it comes down to it. And yes, the result will be a lot of extinctions, with the bonus of them being due to us. Some companies and entities do strive towards these larger changes and are aware so at least it's not universal. But yeah, the majority could care less and the world does not operate on long range thinking and implications.

Climate change is fast tracking things; but we would still have had the honor of obliterating things via habitat loss and pollution, introduction of exotics that destroy endemic populations, and so on.

Nihilism for me? No way. I suppose I go the depressed and hate humanity route.
 

Tengri

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My view is this- we are not the first, nor the last, species headed toward extinction to happen here on earth. I believe there were a total of 6 mass extinctions on earth, and we are just part of that cycle. Also, humans knew for years they were affecting the planet and making climate change accelerate at breakneck speeds, and the entire human race, despite many individual's efforts, have failed to do anything about it. Now, in this critical moment, people are either just going about their business or freaking out about extinction.
I say, humans, as fascinating and wonderful as they are, are also leeches upon the earth- parasites that consume all they can and consume some more, and destroy plants, animals, etc with no mercy. I don't think it's worth it- I say let nature run its course.
I sympathize with your views all up until your conclusion, which is a well-deserved condemnation of rampant greed, neo-imperialism, and the vacant apathy symptomatic of modern culture vs the natural world, though it's critical to point out that humans and their forebears have continued to co-evolve, subsist on proportionately, and commune with their natural environments for millions of years without impacting global temperatures, climate systems, and marine environments until starting around 400 tya. Where even then, on a minimal scale of over-hunting, deforestation, and slash-and-burn agriculture, the style of human civilization characteristic of domination (unfettered mineral extraction, over-fishing and hunting, warfare) is exactly like plague behaviors of insects and rodents after population booms really came into stride. All species go extinct, that is an undeniable exigence of life. Given the style of globalized economies and the historical context of our era, human civilization has reached plague values as an organism (microplastics and industry waste inflict not only ocean wildlife, but our toddlers now) and the various industries and their spokesman will continue to deny ecosystem failure sheerly out of wont of profit and maintaining the current power structures of globalized capitalism, despite the obvious consequences of persistent el nino/la nina, toxified, warming oceans, and deforestation. The lesson here is the style of human subsistence, not the animal itself. The most catastrophic extinction event yet discovered (the Permian-Triassic extinction) occurred 250 million years ago and wiped out almost all species resulted from something eerily similar to our current age: increased greenhouse gases (CO2 and methane) and drastic temperature spikes. No humans involved that time, so why hesitate to reverse or slow the onset of another Ice Age now?

And a part of me wonders- Is this nihilism even good? Why am I not freaking out like my sister? Why do I just shrug, knowing my whole world, myself, those I love, may perish and be extinct?
What are your own thoughts on climate change and the future of humankind as well as other species?
It's unlikely that billions can be herded to overhaul their lifestyles, outlooks, and local understanding to retrofit their relationship with the natural world, and certainly not within a generation. In the same way that Rachel Carson shocked industrialized culture and spooked Americans to suddenly introspect on the wonders and all-too-convenient applications of the chemical industry (as they blithely sprayed themselves down with DDT), so too does this generation need constant reminder to change how they buy, eat, and listen to authority figures so that their offspring can hopefully halt or reverse what futurists since the 80s have predicted to be a future of famine, overpopulation, and dystopia.

There are numerous examples of isolated human cultures both past and present that coexisted with and even honored the wildlife and biomes they subsisted on. To echo writers ranging from EO Wilson, Rachel Carson, Peter Matthiessen, Buckminster Fuller to Alan Weisman: there is grace and dignity to live as an animal and the culmination of modernism is an extreme denial of that.
 

ceecee

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I've run across more people with nihilistic thoughts on climate change than I wanted. I lol at the claims of absolutely not caring about climate change. If that were the case there would be an even bigger surge in suicide.

I feel they come to this conclusion because the solution is larger than they can comprehend. They also seem to think activists are only preaching individual lifestyle changes but in reality activism is aimed more at corporate and government - the ones actually responsible and governments that coddle them. Individual change, like eating less meat or using less disposable plastic is, let's face it, so incredibly hard for these people that they feel climate change rhetoric is nothing more than an attack on their values or culture or lifestyle (even typing that sounds insane but I'm only relating what people have said to me).

We already see plenty of people that do not care if their lives deteriorate, regardless of the reason. So long as the people they believe deserve it most, suffer as well. But this is never the actual entities that cause their economic and physical suffering - they blame people like immigrants. So like the OP says - just shrug and let things take their course. Because doing nothing is much easier and much less difficult to think about.
 

Lark

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I've run across more people with nihilistic thoughts on climate change than I wanted. I lol at the claims of absolutely not caring about climate change. If that were the case there would be an even bigger surge in suicide.

I feel they come to this conclusion because the solution is larger than they can comprehend. They also seem to think activists are only preaching individual lifestyle changes but in reality activism is aimed more at corporate and government - the ones actually responsible and governments that coddle them. Individual change, like eating less meat or using less disposable plastic is, let's face it, so incredibly hard for these people that they feel climate change rhetoric is nothing more than an attack on their values or culture or lifestyle (even typing that sounds insane but I'm only relating what people have said to me).

We already see plenty of people that do not care if their lives deteriorate, regardless of the reason. So long as the people they believe deserve it most, suffer as well. But this is never the actual entities that cause their economic and physical suffering - they blame people like immigrants. So like the OP says - just shrug and let things take their course. Because doing nothing is much easier and much less difficult to think about.

I've seen that sort of thing too, although there was a massive debate at the end of the nineties (I think, could have been earlier) among people reading the eco-anarchist Bookchin about the differences between what he called social anarchism and lifestyle anarchism, it tapped into some earlier schismatic tendendies I guess as Bookchin used to be a Trotskyist but also a lot of ecological battles between (so called) deep greens (Earth First!) and pale greens (Green Party, conservationists).

That debate has since been subsumed, like a lot of dichotomies, in a kind of "why not both?" response, which I reckon makes sense personally, mainly as it did not come down to differences about ends but means and the prevailing view became, which makes sense to me, why exclude anything, small/parochial or large/structural.


I worked with a trash compactor in a small (definitely by US standards) town supermarket once crushing all the packaging which was used before you even got the length of fast moving consumer goods packaging and it was MASSIVE and that really put home efforts at recycling, reducing and refusing efforts in perspective.

Which is not taking into account the incredible environmental impact the world's militaries have, there is no way that your entire air miles and car exhaust emissions for an entire life time are likely to offset the impact of military aircraft or nuclear subs in a few training or war game runs. A lot of the panicks about fuels are often to do with first strike capacities being impacted and not even civilian transport, let alone industry and commerce.

Individual lifestyle changes are cool but I think ultimately they are often about taste as their impact is so small.

The only exception I can think of is how popular Veganism is in Australia, my brother has friends who live there and they very devoted to that cause but they have said that veganism is so popular there it is no inconvenience and a lot of the actual animal content in food, clothing etc. has been reduced even where it still exists (I've eaten some vegan "meat" or "chicken" pies which have made me think about this).

I do think the PCS (personal, cultural, structural) change model is interesting and probably correct but I have real reservations about each of those being equally weighted, the sphere of interest is always going to be much, much greater than the actual sphere of personal influence for instance. Its the confusion about this, individual or personal opinion mattering, which I think gives rise to trolling and some of the more extreme attempts of individuals to engage in thought policing of themselves, family members or friends and others.
 

anticlimatic

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I genuinely feel sorry for people who substitute having a life with being an activist for whatever trendy cause they think will earn them the peace and love they are lacking.
 

1487610420

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I genuinely feel sorry for people who substitute having a life with being an activist for whatever trendy cause they think will earn them the peace and love they are lacking.

you can replace the subject with any other object. If you wanna get really meta, the post itself can become the object. Such is the human experience.
 

anticlimatic

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you can replace the subject with any other object. If you wanna get really meta, the post itself can become the object. Such is the human experience.

I think just about any other object is more effective than the one I mentioned. Including this one.
 

Lark

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I genuinely feel sorry for people who substitute having a life with being an activist for whatever trendy cause they think will earn them the peace and love they are lacking.

This is what I think about cynical capitalist libertarians, conservatives and other sorts of alt righters.
 

Tengri

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I've run across more people with nihilistic thoughts on climate change than I wanted. I lol at the claims of absolutely not caring about climate change. If that were the case there would be an even bigger surge in suicide.

I feel they come to this conclusion because the solution is larger than they can comprehend. They also seem to think activists are only preaching individual lifestyle changes but in reality activism is aimed more at corporate and government - the ones actually responsible and governments that coddle them. Individual change, like eating less meat or using less disposable plastic is, let's face it, so incredibly hard for these people that they feel climate change rhetoric is nothing more than an attack on their values or culture or lifestyle (even typing that sounds insane but I'm only relating what people have said to me).
I think that's really the crux of it.

It really doesn't help matters that the two interrelated processes of global warming and climate change have bloated from being oversensationalized by popular media, so that average people can't distinguish between the impact of emissions on the environment vs changes in ocean currents, weather patterns, and temperatures - though they may seem to overlap, they are indeed separate. That, and environmental issues have been ensconced as the new political paradigm of the 21st Century replacing the sullen stalemate of the Cold War. But comparing apples to oranges for the sake of illustration: the sudden support for LGBT rights and protection is just as extreme a paradigm shift from the established heteronormal culture of just 20-years ago. The difference here is that while political campaigns for sexual identity (or sexual freedom of past generations) can be hugely successful, marketing sexual identity is both embarrassingly obvious and insubstantial. Comparing this now to environmental policy-making however, we find that marketing greening - whether through sustainable business practice, reuse of materials, emission mitigation to organic growing, humane animal welfare, to individual-level product choices (chemical-free shampoos, homespun clothing, high-reliability electronics, or organic cuisine) - has found massive appeal in 15-years time because it's trendy, practicable, and the demand is complicated and at times contradictory. But changing individual beliefs is not as simple as marketing product choices, as anyone that's spent a Sunday afternoon trying to convince a stubborn grandparent to broadening their outlooks. Ironically, reminds me of a story of how my grandmother would force-feed geese corn (foie gras) as a village girl. Something that McDonough and Braungart successfully predicted was a market-level shift to greening and subtle social conditioning of consumers and the next step of whittling away at the anti-science, anti-intellectualism, 'speciesism,' or religious dogma of citizens; an altogether vexing process.

We already see plenty of people that do not care if their lives deteriorate, regardless of the reason. So long as the people they believe deserve it most, suffer as well. But this is never the actual entities that cause their economic and physical suffering - they blame people like immigrants. So like the OP says - just shrug and let things take their course. Because doing nothing is much easier and much less difficult to think about.
It's best to leave individual understanding up to the educators or the individual to work out in their own terms. Itinerant, self-destructive politics masquerading as belief systems are symptoms of something else entirely: like banal self-loathing turned outwards, or what Hannah Arent described as "tyranny without a tyrant."
 

Virtual ghost

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First of all: climate change will not extinct humans. Depending on how things and our actions play out the process it will kill something like 25 to 95% of us, it will destroy plenty of infrastructure, crash global economy as we know it and it will extinct endless forms of life. However some scattered humans will survive for sure unless the process triggers massive nuclear war over depleting resources. So the idea that climate change is the end of the world is generally unscientific, especially since on the scale of solar system not much will change. While on the scale of the galaxy the problem isn't even visible. In a way all this religious passion and hysteria about climate change is exactly why we can't have a honest conversation on the topic, even if there are very evident problems all over the map.


On the other hand most of this world isn't really democratic, so thinking that individual decisions, education and lifestyle changes will fix the problem is probably quite idealistic position. Since it all comes down to dictators that expand their power with fossil fuels and will you be able to counter them if you get off the oil and they don't (if dictatorships take over the situation the climate change wouldn't be solved for sure). Therefore thinking about climate change without geopolitical factor in the mix is destined to miss the reality. However the clock is ticking while both sides are going hysteric and unrealistic over the topic, which is exactly why I place my bet on the "disaster". (I am nihilist in this topic, what I find reasonable under the circumstances)



In the end it all come down to: Are average humans smart enough to save their own life if the problem is global, complex and multi-dimensional.
 

anticlimatic

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This is what I think about cynical capitalist libertarians, conservatives and other sorts of alt righters.

That’s too broad a demographic to make any sense. Plenty in that group live enviously rich and happy lives. Don’t confuse pity with contempt.
 

ceecee

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I think that's really the crux of it.

It really doesn't help matters that the two interrelated processes of global warming and climate change have bloated from being oversensationalized by popular media, so that average people can't distinguish between the impact of emissions on the environment vs changes in ocean currents, weather patterns, and temperatures - though they may seem to overlap, they are indeed separate. That, and environmental issues have been ensconced as the new political paradigm of the 21st Century replacing the sullen stalemate of the Cold War. But comparing apples to oranges for the sake of illustration: the sudden support for LGBT rights and protection is just as extreme a paradigm shift from the established heteronormal culture of just 20-years ago. The difference here is that while political campaigns for sexual identity (or sexual freedom of past generations) can be hugely successful, marketing sexual identity is both embarrassingly obvious and insubstantial. Comparing this now to environmental policy-making however, we find that marketing greening - whether through sustainable business practice, reuse of materials, emission mitigation to organic growing, humane animal welfare, to individual-level product choices (chemical-free shampoos, homespun clothing, high-reliability electronics, or organic cuisine) - has found massive appeal in 15-years time because it's trendy, practicable, and the demand is complicated and at times contradictory. But changing individual beliefs is not as simple as marketing product choices, as anyone that's spent a Sunday afternoon trying to convince a stubborn grandparent to broadening their outlooks. Ironically, reminds me of a story of how my grandmother would force-feed geese corn (foie gras) as a village girl. Something that McDonough and Braungart successfully predicted was a market-level shift to greening and subtle social conditioning of consumers and the next step of whittling away at the anti-science, anti-intellectualism, 'speciesism,' or religious dogma of citizens; an altogether vexing process.


It's best to leave individual understanding up to the educators or the individual to work out in their own terms. Itinerant, self-destructive politics masquerading as belief systems are symptoms of something else entirely: like banal self-loathing turned outwards, or what Hannah Arent described as "tyranny without a tyrant."

If you are unable to grasp the concept of environmental disruption and can't even remain on that subject, we have nothing to discuss.This isn't political, corporations turned it into a political argument and think tanks did the rest. If that's an issue for you, take it up with the fossil fuel industry that commissioned the research and has know about the problem since about 1970 and continued to make the issue worse.
 

Lark

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If you are unable to grasp the concept of environmental disruption and can't even remain on that subject, we have nothing to discuss.This isn't political, corporations turned it into a political argument and think tanks did the rest. If that's an issue for you, take it up with the fossil fuel industry that commissioned the research and has know about the problem since about 1970 and continued to make the issue worse.

That's for sure.

I remember someone telling me long ago when green politics first emerged that they thought the green issues should be subsumed into other parties and that that "single issue" didnt deserve to be a political tendency or party by itself.

The extent to which all other parties and tendencies have choosen to be in total denial about environmental impact and degradation has only prove how its important to have an exclusively green agenda or party.
 
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