From a long, but worthwhile post, Putting the Future Back in the Room:
The planetary crisis we face may be made up of machinery and market failures and sheer masses of humanity struggling to live, but I'm more and more convinced that it is not at its core really a material crisis at all. Rather, the planetary crisis is a crisis of vision; we see a growing and darkening void where our future ought to be. The average person, presented with accurate information about the state of the world, can see no way forward at all. The path we're on appears to end in darkness and a swift, cataclysmic drop. Most folks, entirely understandably, choose not to look.
That void in our future vision, I believe, is not accidental. In the 40 years since the first Earth Day, a whole set of industries has grown large attacking scientists and conservationists; falsely complexifying issues; spinning the news of environmental crimes; launching astroturf front groups; endowing think tanks; bribing politicians; obfuscating the need for systemic change by pushing funding towards NGOs that advocate the most limited of personal actions; and by promoting (in the most direct financial sense) cultural work that promotes cynicism and a disdain (if not a hatred) for idealists, from talk radio to teabagging. In a twist on the old axiom that tyrants don't care if they are hated so long as their subjects don't love each other, these industries don't care if the future they're offering us looks dark, so long as no other futures we can imagine look brighter. Despairing consumers still buy, and they cause less trouble for the investing class. "We have an economy," as Paul Hawken says, "where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it G.D.P." Keeping the future dark hides the crime.
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