We is who we is

About the best summing up of our human condition I've read in the several years comes from a colleague here at work (Otago Poytechnic), Anni Watkins who wrote:

Having spent an evening following blogs on New Scientist, I have reached the following conclusions (where 'we' are those responding to NS blogs worldwide)

1. We are extremely rude and offensive
2. We don't really care much about the planet, the future, or our children
3. We care a lot about now and about our own personal lives
4. We like 'moral' arguments, especially ones not based on any logic or science, like eat vegan / vegetarian because eating animals is barbaric, which gets heavily confused with eat less meat because its better for the environment (example might be an article on eating roos because they dont burp methane like ruminants, which descended into a slanging match including garbage about roos being shot and left to die slowly so that the meat stayed fresh..... farts (as opposed to burps), the right to eat meat, the concept that humans 'have' to eat meat, etc etc.... very little on ruminant methane production issues). We especially like the idea that God is gonna get us for being immoral (global warming is caused by adultery, must be all those hot bods!)
5. We don't want to hear anything we don't like, so we will side with the counter argument (and vice versa)
6. VERY IMPORTANTLY: Frankly my dear, We don't actually give a damn about the planet, we only care about our species, our race, our country, our neighboorhood, our friends and family and ourselves (probably in reverse order). So, is it gonna do me any good/harm or just curb my lifestyle? Is it gonna do other humans currently alive and good/harm? How much do I care about them? Will a bunch of people - in another country, of a different skin colour/religion - matter (esp.if they are too poor to respond by fighting to stay alive)? Do we care about wildlife? How much? We only see it on David Attenborough progs anyway. So, snow leopards in decline might catch our imagination, if the media serves them up to us. They probably matter more than starving children because we've seen so many of them on the media that they are beginning to make us feel bad, anyway, starving children aren't likely to go extinct eh?

On the other hand, maybe I can make a moral argument out of it. I'm holier than thou 'cos I drive a green car, make a small footprint (my green calculator tells me so), eat less/no meat/animal products (which I can be desperately holier than thou about because I don't live in an environment incapable of supporting much more than seasonal grass), etc etc etc. I think I (Anni) fit into this category actually, which is making me squirm somewhat.

So while I'm here in this category, I can safely say that when I went to uni, we were young people shouting into the void about all this. But now we are middle aged people living in oil crisis, pollution, social inequity, climatic uncertainty.... the problems really are happening now. Presumably this is why people are beginning to care now. Not about the future, the planet, the ecosystem, the children of tomorrow, but about the problems that are happening now, to us, to me. We ain't "all gonna die" (tho some people are, for sure), but we sure are going to be inconvenienced.

No, I haven't answered the question. I'm not sure I can talk to the 'we' I have discovered, but I thought you might like to know what that particular 'we' are thinking!

I concur with this view and have grave doubts that any form of sustainability initiative--even the Transition Towns Movement--can lead anywhere unless the fundamental separation paradigm (as espoused by Charles Eisenstein in his book, The Ascent of Humanity) is first addressed.