The natural world doesn’t care what
humans think. But it responds forcefully to what we actually do. Climate
change was no threat for the first million years of human existence, not
because we paid more attention then to the
atmosphere’s carbon level, but because we hadn’t discovered fossil fuels and their energy
potential. We hadn’t started burning them.

I’m reading a new book called Navigating
Environmental Attitudes, by Thomas A. Heberlein, an environmental
sociologist retired from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He uses the
metaphor of whitewater rafting (pictured on the cover) to describe such
problems as the obstacles under the surface, the ones you can’t see, that
affect the swirling waters the most; the slow changes that happen to rocks in
the river over the course of eons; the need to “go with the flow” of attitudes,
and so on.
He tells fascinating research stories showing that attitudes
He tells fascinating research stories showing that attitudes