If you have read the first blog on tunnel vision, you have understood that Global warming is a direct consequence of all the little daily choices we are making.
The eyes see what the mind knows. Thus if we want to make the right choices to prevent a catastrophic future for our children we need to be well informed. That is not a choice, there is no excuse which works.
Indeed, there is no scarcity of excuses. In subsequent blogs, I will discuss Ego depletion, which means that our mind cannot look at multiple complex problems at the same time and we already have multiple problems in our life already, So, it figures why many of us may not find the time or inclination to read this blog.
An apt analogy can explain the situation better.
Imagine you are in a thick forest alone on an expedition and you are spotted by the tiger. The tiger approaches you for his juicy meal, in the camouflage of the dried vegetation very slowly. In this situation, whether you have the skill required to understand the approaching danger and grasping that “you are being watched and followed by a tiger secretly”, may mean life and death for you and gaining that knowledge is vital for you. We must understand that the final result would be the same if you are completely unaware of the situation or you are aware of it but you remain ignorant about it and continue pretending that the tiger is non-existent or the tiger is actually a toy tiger.
The responsibility of getting awareness of the tiger attack lies with you and you alone. Grasping the urgency of the situation and taking preventive action is the only way you can save yourselves from an ugly death.
Similarly, an approaching hurricane or a famine would not affect your children less severely because they are your children or because you were ill-informed about the possibility and thus did not carry out climate action. The aggravated spread of diseases due to climate change like dengue or malaria will not spare your child because you had no knowledge of the danger. The responsibility of gaining knowledge about significance and action both lie on us.
This blog should be read, not because you have 15 minutes of spare time (truth is that almost no one has it) and you need some entertainment. You need to read this blog (or the book or other means of getting knowledge about this) because it is better to read it and get informed about what choices are right and what is wrong so that we know what are the right choices. It may happen that the circumstances today are not right and not all the right choices are available today. But walking slowly towards making the right choices available would never happen unless we do not know what the right choices are.
Similarly, one thing to remember in the above analogy is, that the responsibility to spread the right knowledge is also ours. This means that, for example in the above analogy, imagine what will happen if you know exactly how to save yourselves from the tiger and without delay you climb a tree, however your child does not know what needs to be done and thus lags behind in taking action and thus becomes more vulnerable to the tiger attack. Or your child could not be saved because one of your colleagues had no knowledge of this. In that case, who is responsible for the potential bad fate of your child? No one but you. It was your responsibility to make your child or your colleagues aware of the dangers and the ways to prevent them even before any of the above happens. Similarly, it is our responsibility to encourage others to gain knowledge about this topic.
to take climate action” will not make the coming Global warming less severe.
However, getting the right knowledge is important. There is no paucity of the wrong kind of knowledge both in the real and virtual world. This will become clear after you read the blog on Halo phenomenon and Bias.
There are several ways to gain the right knowledge besides reading this blog or my book. There are loads of books and websites online, written by those who have vested interests (or bias) to make others continue their business as usual so that they or their employers do not develop financial losses. It is indeed, bad news that this lobby who promote Climate change denial is significantly wealthy and powerful. Thus a major part of the free online content may have various shades of denial and may not be the right source from which to gather information.
All said and done, one should understand that everything one reads is information. We have to convert it into knowledge in our brain. One has to keep applying your brain and understand why we need to take a chosen path instead of blindly following someone. One glaring example of this is the common recommendation by a lot of self-appointed experts who often advocate measures like wooden houses or wooden skyscrapers (a recommendation which is even present in excellent books on climate solutions like “The Drawdown project”). A single wooden house would need to clear an acre of forests, multiple wooden skyscrapers, if constructed all over would nothing but an ecological disaster and would aggravate the habitat destruction and extinction crisis.
Gaining information and knowledge should not end with a book or a blog. In fact, there should be a constant hunger for knowledge for such an important topic. It should be coming from each and every direction.
Today at the age of technological revolution, we have many means to disseminate knowledge like Twitter. If we follow multiple experts in the field of our interest, their tweets can act as a good constant source of knowledge seeping slowly into your brain and accumulating in your brain as an ocean of knowledge.
According to the famous Canadian Climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe, the best thing you can do about climate change is to talk about it.
In India, the knowledge of the significance of this topic is so small, that those who want to initiate this topic are immediately silenced by the lack of interest of others. Most believe that climate change exists only in books or is a western problem and that there is no need for them to waste time on this.
This attitude needs to change. We will find time if we want to. If we don’t find the time, we never intended to find time in the first place.
In books, a large portion of the knowledge can be obtained in a short period of time. In Blog, however, you have to wait for the next blog to come. The central message of my book being “Root out deforestation i.e. develop empathy for all green members”, I would recommend an e-book version of my book or for that matter any book on climate change which you wish to read, given the fact that one of the leading causes of deforestation is “paper”.
Indeed, the same droplets of knowledge, you would get from time to time, if you follow me on twitter or read my blog regularly.
Written by: Dr. Rohit Kale
Follow on Twitter: @RohitKale23
Contact on: drkalerohit23@gmail.com
Website: saveourmotherearth.in
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