Recently the Victorian psychologist and author, Danielle Clode, talked about her new book, “A Future in Flames” (right), and in answer to a question about why people had not heard the advice in the lead up to the fires or warnings about the collision of ideal fire weather events, she argued most were mentally and emotionally unable to assimilate those alerts.
Life had evolved as imagined, but they had never visualized it being interrupted by fire and so smoke was, until they actually saw threatening flame, nothing more than a controlled burn-off.
The psychological road block we witnessed in February is again evident as we plummet toward decided difficulties brought on by significant human induced changes to our climate and an oil scarcity that will upend our lives.
Look around and most everything in sight is there because of oil and that bountiful supply of energy has shaped our way of living, and, more importantly, our mindset.
We have been mentally crippled, myself included, by earth’s generousity and it is a rare soul who can see how they and their fellows will live in a low-energy future.
Scientists around the world constantly alert us to our excesses, but with fossil fuels and resources so implicated in our lifestyles, few of us are able to imagine an escape or even see a need for one
Beyond that, comforted by doubters who excavate irrelevant detail attributed to an equally irrelevant fields of science, most of us who are unable to make sense of complex climate science, continue with business as usual and so worsen emerging and existing difficulties.
Warnings about the bushfires were many and frequent, but strangely not heard by those who most needed to hear them; the warnings about global heating and oil scarcity have been loud and frequent, but I doubt we are listening.
