Why It Seems Hard to Get Some Traction

Beyond the obvious reasons that it requires overwhelming evidence to overcome the influence of vested economic interests, I’ve speculated from time to time why it’s so hard for us to come to grips with large intractable environmental problems (climate change, resource depletion, regional and global impacts to health from some environmental pollutants, lifestyle-related chronic disease burden). Here’s a couple of points I’ve found:

Our perception of the potential impacts (melting glaciers, flooding, disease and starvation, a generation of reproductively and cognitively impaired people, the list could go on. . .) is so awful that it numbs us into complacency.

As a society, we are really good at engaging in wishful thinking. An example is the current craze for The Secret, where optimistic worldview lapses into delusional thinking (note: John Gavois threw the baby out with the bathwater, but there are still some good points made here).

We’ve succumbed to “learned helplessness” by an inability to correctly perceive and assess relative risks. In my line of work, I observe people blithely accept major risks (lung cancer from smoking; Type 2 diabetes from improper diet and lack of exercise; premature death from regional air pollution with particulate matter), while being acutely concerned about fairly smaller risks to their health (for example, from exposure to low levels of certain other environmental pollutants such as benzene, trichloroethylene or dioxins and furans).

This is just a placeholder. The posts are few and far between because there’s no real time to write. The day job is all-consuming right now. I want to come back to this topic later.