Gaia Vince, "Does climate breakdown mean we’re doomed? No: if we’re brave, big change can happen fast" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/11/climate-breakdown-climate-crisis-solutions-idea

« We are living inside the imagination of our ancestors. »

Starting with a beautiful and helpful image, the author quickly relapses into fantasies of Ernest Callenbach's "Ecotopia" – small-town romance with bike lanes and neighbourhood handshakes. It is such suggestions and appeal to local activism that today make people hopeless in the first place.

On a larger note, it is stunning how people in search of "solutions" regularly fall back on images and concepts that are 40 years old or older (like they oppose nuclear power on the ground of prejudices and ideas that are likewise 40 years old).

That these "solutions" depend on a landscape of culture and infrastructure that is also already bygone doesn't occur to them. The only adaptation they seem capable of is taking these old suggestions and try to scale them to today's industrial levels and sizes ... thereby making these old suggestions hoplelessly unworkable.

In that sense, modern environmental and climate activists are the most reactionary activists. They profess to care for the future but advocate for an outdated past.

#postdoom