Yes, I’d say so. As I see it, the climate crisis is a human matter and we should treat it like that. It involves our way of living and, ultimately, our connections to others, our emotions. As every changing moment in our lives, as in every crisis, we can choose how to react: to be conservative and behave like we always did (the way that brought us to the crisis, actually) or to adapt to a terrifying scenario that we can’t pretend it’s not there. As the crisis is a major one, we have to committ ourselves to a major or deep adaptation.
What Bendell suggests about resilience, relinquishment and restoration is, in my opinion, also a psychological and cognitive process to face. As different studies start to report, there is something called “eco-anxiety” that affects more and more people (this article suggests the our Bendell has something to do with it). The geographical scale of the impact makes it invisible and, at the same time, overwhelming for any person. We can react with different shades of denial and / or feel totally powerless. OR, even accepting the anxiety coming with it, shift from the individual to the communal and work actively to this radical transformation our societies need.
What I intend to highlight, here, is that we shouldn’t forget the human side and the importance of emotions to succeed.
So, @GrahamCaswell when you say:
my focus is on visibility - on making climate change visible. This involves internalising the cost of climate change into the price of everything (carbon pricing), making full and accessible information on the carbon content and climate consequences for every carbon-intensive activity (carbon labeling), and giving investors, customers, employees and other stakeholders full information on the carbon content and climate risk of every significant organisation (carbon and climate disclosure). My thesis and argument is that “the market” is not free or rational or effective without full information (including price and disclosure information) being available to every participant at the point of every spending or investment decision.
I think this is a good move and I thank you for the work you’re doing in Ireland and at a larger scale. Nonetheless, I personally see it as a short term move or a stage in the path to reach more awareness among a wide public. But I don’t know if “the market” will be the same in a not so long frame of time and I don’t know if we have to keep playing by someone else’s book. Here is where I see the value of the Econ-SF (economic science fiction seminar - this was our first edition) and the need to imagine new paradigms of economic and societal change.
Speaking of collapsology, here is one of the most famous and expert in describing the situation and the possible ways to get out of it, Pablo Servigne (@alberto, I think I’m going to invite him to the next Econ-SF) in a subtitled conference about a future without oil.