The number of attendees at any mass protest It is usually inversely proportional to the number of people who know what they are saying (or they simply know what it is doing there, like sheep led to the fold, because they lack the necessary information to understand a complex problem).
At least, the educational level of the protesters is significant after consulting the sociodemographic profile of protesters between the years 1980 and 2008, according to the CIS.
If the element “violence” is added, then the number of the second group may even reach zero; giving rise to the paradox that it is precisely the most gregarious and staid people who protest most energetically, and the most critical and free, those who do not.
This is the first idea, pam, on the forehead, that the environmental activist slips Michael Shellenberger in his book There is no apocalypse: Why environmental alarmism hurts us all.
Shellenberger thus alludes in his first pages to the violent and bitter environmental protests of Extinction Rebellion in London, at the beginning of October 2019. "The Earth is dying," they said. Which, obviously, justified any misdeeds on his part.
Rational and enlightened environmentalism
This anecdote was, among other things, what motivated Shellenberger to write this book: because the conversation about the environment has gotten out of control over the last few years.
There is no apocalypse: Why environmental alarmism harms us all (No collection)
Her intention, then, is to put an end to the exaggeration, alarmism and extremism typical of a girl with braids, which are the enemy of positive, humanist and rational environmentalism ("I don't want you to have hope, she said Greta Thunberg, "I want you to panic"). And the people, even those who were much more educated than her, nodded ruefully. Or at least he pretended he did.
Within the current panorama, then, books like this are necessary. Of course, we are not before the Bible, but it is a counterweight that allows us to balance the balance of other publications that do pass for being the Bible, and that are also too inclined towards alarm, a very specific inseparable ideological pack and a kind of romanticization of protest (as if the massive and very bitter protest, in itself, legitimized an idea).
And, above all, this book allows for a more in-depth reading of what scientists and ecologists (not ecologists) point out about what is happening in the world and to what extent can they predict what is going to happen.
Like any thorny issue, we would be wrong if we did not have a multifaceted vision of the solutions to the problem that concerns us: nothing less than the survival of the human species, or at least its well-being and prosperity.
Because, in most developed countries, carbon emissions have been declining for more than a decade after peaking. Deaths due to extreme weather, even in poor nations, have fallen by 80 percent over the past four decades. And the risk of the Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely, thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas. What is really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism? Powerful financial interests. Desire for status and power. But above all there is a desire for transcendence among supposedly secular people. This spiritual impulse can be natural and healthy. But by preaching fear without love, and guilt without redemption, the new religion is failing to satisfy our deepest psychological and existential needs.
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The news
Books that inspire us: 'There is no apocalypse' by Michael Shellenberger
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.