The Great Disconnect: the human disease of which climate change is but one symptom

 

Posted on 7 February 2013 by John Mason

http://www.skepticalscience.com/the-great-disconnect.html#comments

 

‘I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes – to come  to this at last…’

 

‘…It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.’

 

from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1895)

 

“Connectivity. We utterly rely on it. Without connectivity, our civilisation ceases to exist. That’s a big statement to make, but I will argue below how, over the past fifty years, many of us have lost the full understanding of its importance, or in many cases have not developed such an understanding. In a destabilising climate, that  detachment becomes all the more problematic.”

 

John was criticised for posting this essay – +