It can be hard to get one's mind around why we are letting the world go to hell in a handbasket, when we know the damage we're causing. But when one realised a few fundamental things about humans it becomes clear (at least for now - I might have it all wrong and someone will put me right).
As you've implied, without perhaps saying it explicitly, humans are a species. Like all species, they evolved based on mutations that were beneficial now, not beneficial over the long term. This is how evolution works. Humans are no different from other species in that they maximize energy throughput. Humans are superb at accessing resources and chanelling energy, which is why we've done so much damage. True, for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years, we seemed to fit in as part of climax ecologies but I think this was an illusion because innovations and discoveries that allowed us to succeed, in the moment, occurred very slowly. Humans had to make the discoveries first and then work to perfect them. And there were so few humans. Some of the innovations allowed humans to spread around the globe and wreak even more havoc in ecosystems where we didn't evolve. Humans can't stop being species just because some of us realise the effects we're having.
Also, it's clear that there is no such thing as free will (for example, see Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined: A Life Without Free Will). There are only the neural nets that have evolved as part of us (same for all species with a brain). Our decisions are the results of the firing of a set sequence of neurons, that we have no conscious control over. So the only way to get humans to act differently is to alter the way neurons connect and what prompts them to fire. Providing information to the brains can cause some alteration but most of how a brain developed is already baked in: our genes, the environment and epi-genetics, our upbringing, our culture. Then there is the weather, how badly we slept, the toxins we breathe in or consume, and so on. Discovering and communicating reality is just one part of what goes into our neural make up. So it can't change quickly.
But even if our brains could be rewired in a way that gets us to act, what would we try to achieve? A sustainable way of life is not one that includes the use of non-renewable resources (since they are a one-off limited resource). The only sustainable way of life, I can think of is a hunter-gatherer existence using only simple wooden or woven tools and equipment. But that isn't the type of existence that 8.2 billion people can undertake on the planet as it stands. So what do we want people to do? This is something I'm wrestling with. It's not going to be possible to rewire the brains of enough people to willingly regress to a hunter-gatherer existence. Perhaps we just have to be happy with a return to some way of life that was much much simpler, perhaps from a few centuries ago in western nations. But for all peoples of the world?
I just don't see a path forward but maybe with enough minds thinking about it, we can come up with just about acceptable ideas? One thing I know, though, is that we have to realise what is actually possible and sustainable, even if only for a few millennia.
It can be hard to get one's mind around why we are letting the world go to hell in a handbasket, when we know the damage we're causing. But when one realised a few fundamental things about humans it becomes clear (at least for now - I might have it all wrong and someone will put me right).
As you've implied, without perhaps saying it explicitly, humans are a species. Like all species, they evolved based on mutations that were beneficial now, not beneficial over the long term. This is how evolution works. Humans are no different from other species in that they maximize energy throughput. Humans are superb at accessing resources and chanelling energy, which is why we've done so much damage. True, for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years, we seemed to fit in as part of climax ecologies but I think this was an illusion because innovations and discoveries that allowed us to succeed, in the moment, occurred very slowly. Humans had to make the discoveries first and then work to perfect them. And there were so few humans. Some of the innovations allowed humans to spread around the globe and wreak even more havoc in ecosystems where we didn't evolve. Humans can't stop being species just because some of us realise the effects we're having.
Also, it's clear that there is no such thing as free will (for example, see Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined: A Life Without Free Will). There are only the neural nets that have evolved as part of us (same for all species with a brain). Our decisions are the results of the firing of a set sequence of neurons, that we have no conscious control over. So the only way to get humans to act differently is to alter the way neurons connect and what prompts them to fire. Providing information to the brains can cause some alteration but most of how a brain developed is already baked in: our genes, the environment and epi-genetics, our upbringing, our culture. Then there is the weather, how badly we slept, the toxins we breathe in or consume, and so on. Discovering and communicating reality is just one part of what goes into our neural make up. So it can't change quickly.
But even if our brains could be rewired in a way that gets us to act, what would we try to achieve? A sustainable way of life is not one that includes the use of non-renewable resources (since they are a one-off limited resource). The only sustainable way of life, I can think of is a hunter-gatherer existence using only simple wooden or woven tools and equipment. But that isn't the type of existence that 8.2 billion people can undertake on the planet as it stands. So what do we want people to do? This is something I'm wrestling with. It's not going to be possible to rewire the brains of enough people to willingly regress to a hunter-gatherer existence. Perhaps we just have to be happy with a return to some way of life that was much much simpler, perhaps from a few centuries ago in western nations. But for all peoples of the world?
I just don't see a path forward but maybe with enough minds thinking about it, we can come up with just about acceptable ideas? One thing I know, though, is that we have to realise what is actually possible and sustainable, even if only for a few millennia.