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At a local level environmental decisions are highly political. Try building a road, a wind farm, a cycle lane, or a pedestrian precinct and you will get a lot
by 7952 7y ago
At a local level environmental decisions are highly political. Try building a road, a wind farm, a cycle lane, or a pedestrian precinct and you will get a lot of anger and passion. And a lot of interventions have a number of unintended consequences that affect people.
A lot of these environmental decisions have winners and losers. That makes them political and partisan. But politicians often don't want to deal with that. They want to delegate authority to a bunch of experts and independent organisations who can make objective decisions. Except there are still loosers who will be angry. And they just see a faceless beurocracy that doesn't care what they think.
We should accept that the environment is political and try and win the argument. Stop relying on science and actually pursuade people on an emotional and moral level.
- carapace 7y agoPersonally, I think the problem is Spiritual, and no amount of politics will fix it. We are divorced from Nature, we treat life as a thing to exploit rather than neighbors to live with. I don't think we can save ourselves without a deep shift in our world view, a renewal of our relationship with life. I think we will either reach a crisis and transform (in a biologically-rooted variant of the Singularity, IRL not cyberspace) or we will crash and burn. Of course, there's a third possibility: we scrape by without crashing and without spiritual renaissance, e.g. some combination of geo-engineering and ecological agriculture lets us off the climate-apocalypse hook. In the first two scenarios we don't need politics anymore, but in the third it still exists and is caught up in the strange loops of modern space-age-a-go-go life.