How the Next Victim of Climate Change Will Be Our Minds (Wired)

[NashVegas]

By Clive Thompson

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-01/st_thompson

Australia is suffering through its worst dry spell in a millennium. The outback has turned into a dust bowl, crops are dying off at fantastic rates, cities are rationing water, coral reefs are dying, and the agricultural base is evaporating.

But what really intrigues Glenn Albrecht — a philosopher by training — is how his fellow Australians are reacting.

They're getting sad.

In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, scores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don't grow any more. Gardens won't take. Birds are gone. "They no longer feel like they know the place they've lived for decades," he says.

Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They're suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven't moved anywhere. It's just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.

...

but in truth it's a pretty natural human urge to identify with a place and build one's sense of self around its comforts and permanence. I live in Manhattan, where the globe-hopping denizens tend to go berserk if their favorite coffee shop closes down. How will they react in 20 or 30 years if the native trees can't handle the 5-degree spike in average temperature? Or if weird new bugs infest the city in summer, fall shrinks to a single month, and snow becomes a distant memory? "We like to think that we're cool, 21st-century people, but the basic sense of a connection to the land is still big," Albrecht says. "We haven't evolved that much.

[villager]

1. I wonder if the "consumerist hysteria" of Americans isn't already a response

to the destruction of the real/natural world around them...

a crazed acting-out, etc...

Thanks for posting.

[The Stranger]

2. At the far end of town where the Grickle-grass grows,

and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows,
and no birds ever sing excepting old crows . . .

[NorthernSpy]

3. good article!

Thanks for the link!


:thumbsup: