Is it as bad to ignore the good things as to ignore the bad things?

[Claire]

Clearly, it's not a good idea to bury one's head in the sand and ignore the things that are going wrong or that might be a threat.

However is it also as bad to refuse to see the improvements that are being made and the good work that is being done to solve problems?

Ignoring the good things might make us feel hopeless and apathetic. We cannot praise the good work or support it by changing our habits of consumption to embrace the better alternatives. We can't tell others about the good things if we refuse to know about them, so risk making them feel depressed and apathetic too.

I admit that I know what I think but I wondered what the response might be from our doomier and gloomier members? (the less doomy and gloomy are welcome to respond as well, just to keep the things cheerful).

[August]

Yeah, I'm among the gloomier ones, right? At least that's what people like to think. And here's the thing: I'm seeing a building and construction boom which is spreading across the world. I also see that rainforests are being razed at a very high speed both in South Asia, Africa and South America. I also see that there is no real breakthrough in solar and wind energy here on the northern hemisphere. And I mean: these are just a few examples. The thing is: the bad things cancel the good news out. And it is my personal experience from the Kingdom of Norway that people do not even consider changing lightbulbs, since all sorts of green behaviour is understood as BAD OMEN. And when it comes to the money involved in oil, gas, coal and overfishing: "Hey, hey, hey! This is Norway! Get in line."

Here's my problem: the consumption of oiol, gas, and coal is the main driver of enhanced greenhouse effect, which leads to climate change and extreme weather events all round. So I can't understand why people want to see me dead for saying that we shouldn't be using the fossil stuff..???!!

[spadlet]

I don't know if this is true but somebody once told me that Mother Teresa would only get involved with positive things. So if she wasn't happy about a war, she wouldn't atend and anti-war demonstration, but she would attend a peace demonstration.

The point being that you only have so much time and energy. You have to choose how you spend it. If you spend all your time throwing rocks at something you don't like, you have less time to spend on setting up, developing and promoting alternative, better things.

So I guess I think it's important to be able to explain why you choose to do things and to question what you are doing, but it makes more difference to promote the alternatives which you prefer. After all, supermarkets etc bombard people with their adverts etc. If all of the advertising people saw (and recomendations they heard from people they knew) was for fresh local products and advice for self-suficiency how many of them would think to go to supermarkets and buy food that had come half way around the world?

[August]

You've got a few good points there, Spadlet. I can easily connect with every possible peace message. As I see it: we can't get together in resuing our ecosystems unless we can achieve a more peaceful reality than what is given us these days. And I hold political leaders, multinational corporations and crazy fanatic religious people with political powers in place responsible for all the warfare going on.

Now, I also think that green thinking could be advertised much better. But here is one of those things: I got seriously involved with environment/ecology issues in 2004, just before the Club of Rome posed this excruciating question to the world (see below)

CLUB OF ROME

There are a couple of points in the last paragraph here: "On the one hand we recognise an increasing flow of information that may potentially provide us with more knowledge about the world around us. On the other hand we also identify a growing information overload causing confusion and disorientation and an increasing tendency on misuse of information and information channels, obscuring the premises of the public and private decision-making and increasing to public ignorance."

I can see no progress on the part of the mass media. Misuse of information channels must be recognized as a major problem.

"The sun always shines on TV." ~ A-Ha.

[debsgreen]

Somebody once said to me, if what you do is so great, why are you so miserable? How can you make a difference if you do let all the "bad" get you down, and have a shitty attitude? People don't like to listen to unhappy people get on their soapbox. For me, I have really found that by changing myself, and my attitudes, and even perceptions about what is going on in the world, has a much larger impact. There truly is no better way to lead, then by example.

[include]

For me if you don't look at the positive things that are happening life gets pretty depressing. I reckon personally that things are generally getting better, but we still have things that need doing.

[Richard]

For those who are really intersted, you want to read something like this:

Amazon.co.uk: The Improving State of the World:...

It's quite dense and heavy going in places but you can't fault the amount of data in there. It's also fairly unbiased for an environmental text which I usually find lean too much one way or the other (pessimism or optimism). The book shows that things aren't nearly as bad as some people like to think they are.

[bruce]

Is it of a similar vein to Lomborg?

[Richard]

It's more objective than Lomborg.

[bruce]

Fair enough. I'll add it to my reading list.