3 months ago “Essentially, overshoot is a crisis of human behaviour,” says Merz. “For decades we’ve been telling people to change their behaviour without saying: ‘Change your behaviour.’ We’ve been saying ‘be more green’ or ‘fly less’, but meanwhile all of the things that drive behaviour have been pushing the other way. All of these subtle cues and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing the opposite direction – and we’ve been wondering why nothing’s changing.”
The paper explores how neuropsychology, social signalling and norms have been exploited to drive human behaviours which grow the economy, from consuming goods to having large families. The authors suggest that ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one’s status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategiesto create behaviours incompatible with a sustainable world.
“People are the victims – we have been exploited to the point we are in crisis. These tools are being used to drive us to extinction,” says the evolutionary behavioural ecologist and study co-author Phoebe Barnard. “Why not use them to build a genuinely sustainable world?”
7 months ago Interesting #article💬 about the breakdown of our climate being due to a "behavioral crisis" driven by marketing. The accumulation of advertisers and counter-intelligence programs to confuse and persuade the populace for a variety of profit-motivated reasons have conspired to rob us of our better judgment and left the populace degenerating into consumerist addicts who cannot address large collective problems or have a cohesive narrative or conversation that won't be polluted by corporate interests.
“We’ve socially engineered ourselves the way we geoengineered the planet,” says Joseph Merz, lead author of a new paper which proposes that climate breakdown is a symptom of ecological overshoot, which in turn is caused by the deliberate exploitation of human behaviour.
This is a countdown to how much time we have left to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees celsius!!! Only a couple years left... We gotta get our shit together!!!
..these symptoms are a sign of all of us humans failing each other, and they will only worsen as long as we fail to rapidly and radically alter our lifestyles to better suit our biosphere.
Excerpts:
"[wildfires are] also burning throughout the Arctic Circle, particularly in Siberia. The flames release climate-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."
“The amount of CO2 emitted from Arctic Circle fires in June 2019 is larger than all of the CO2 released from Arctic Circle fires in the same month from 2010 through to 2018 put together,” Thomas Smith, a geography professor at the London School of Economics, told Motherboard.
"The heat baked France, which shattered its temperature record: In Gallargues-le-Montueux, in southern France, temps hit 114 degrees Fahrenheit on June 28, beating the 2003 record of 111 degrees during a heat wave that left 15,000 dead."
"Temperatures hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit in early June in Churu in Northern India. They’ve abated since, but water reservoirs are still drying up."
"In the Chinese capital, temperatures hit at least 102 degrees Fahrenheit in early June, according to the Beijing News. That’s the hottest day the city’s seen in the last 50 years."