An excerpt from Niclas Hallstrom's The Enviromental Crisis: Threats to Health and Ways Forward
"Environmental changes are often slow when measured against the course of an individual human lifetime. These changes, therefore, do not evoke strong, immediate reactions, although they may be as much a survival issue as any other immediate dangers that we encounter and instinctively try to escape from. Biological evolution has programmed us, like all other species, to react most strongly to current, immediate problems rather than to possible future threats.
Local environmental destruction, therefore, is often much easier to detect and connect with ones own health and well-being than are distant global problems. People working at or living close to waste-dumps, polluting factories, highways and pesticide-sprayed fields are often acutely aware of how their health is affected and understand the causes and effects. It is also in these situations that people react most forcefully. The struggle for a cleaner environment and improved health become an immediate struggle for survival, with the power to mobilise people to take action, demonstrate, engage in civil disobedience and form grassroots activist organisations.
The challenge now is to strengthen these local struggles while also evoking a similar strong sense of urgency and seriousness when it comes to long-term, global environmental change. Here, it is much more difficult to see the direct causes and effects, and it may be more difficult to identify who benefits in the short run and who pays the price in the long run. Often, present beneficiaries may also suffer in the long term. In short, it requires a qualitatively different type of understanding to see why and how long-term ecosystem disruption will endanger health and our very survival. Although the international panel of climate researchers have unanimously concluded that global emissions of greenhouse gases must be curbed to a fraction of current levels within a few decades in order to avoid a catastrophic climate changes, the worlds governments are still negotiating on the margin, agreeing on a few per cent reductions for the coming decades. The powers-that-be seem to believe that the life-supporting capacity of the natural systems is open to negotiation: that it will somehow be possible to get away with abusing the Earthor perhaps that it is simply not worth giving up some of the short-term individual benefits for the sake of the long-term survival of future generations and the planet itself. This tendency is both shortsighted and cynical, and must be countered by networks of people who take responsibility also for the future.
As governments and business have not yet shown that they can abandon short-term agendas, most of the hope falls on peoples movements and civil society organisations (CSOs) being able to take the lead."
I think about this stuff a lot. This guy said it.