Nature escapes the ideology of Greta and her followers
We live in an age of social networks and media phenomena, and it is therefore not surprising that sometimes reality risks being obscured by the aforementioned phenomena. It is also evident that emotional waves often break down on social media , which are unstoppable, to the point that it is difficult for everyone to resist their power.
These reflections arise spontaneously – at least to myself – when we talk about the case of Greta Thunberg, the 19-year-old Swedish activist who is depopulating the mass media and is received with great fanfare by popes, presidents and various powerful people.
Without a doubt, ecology is a serious matter and enormous merits must be given to it. In particular, that of having stimulated reflection on the natural environment that surrounds us and sensitivity to the problems created by scientific and technological progress that has revolutionized our lives over the last few centuries.
Like all "isms", however, this too can easily take demagogic folds if emotionality replaces reasoning, and if emotions prevail too clearly over logic. Especially if you fully embrace, without a minimum of reasoning, the now prevailing thesis according to which climate changes are "totally" attributable to us.
This thesis is now taken for granted (and scientifically proven) without taking into account the objections that a minority, in which there are also scientists, still dares to address it. Since it is known that the Earth is periodically subject to climatic changes. Some of small importance, others of great importance. And the latter – for example glaciations or very hot times – also occurred relatively recently.
This means that natural reality, which should never be confused with the linguistic and social reality of human beings, follows logics that are not determined by us. It is not a human-made reality and neither is it fully predictable, as demonstrated by the impossibility of predicting earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. After all, the Covid-19 pandemic itself demonstrates our cognitive limits. Natural reality does not follow logics of any kind, except those that we impose on them with our conceptual schemes.
Strange to say, but it seems that extreme environmentalism instead believes in the idea that human beings are able to totally control natural reality, to the point of being able to reverse the course of events. And this closely resembles the thesis of Karl Marx and of the Marxist tradition that followed his lesson. Therefore a little prudence would not hurt, avoiding the uncritical adoption of the theses only because they prevail at the level of the mass media . Moreover, even if competence is no longer an appreciated value today, while incompetence and carelessness are everywhere, one can ask oneself exactly what the competences in this field are of such a young activist. At the cost of being unpopular, I believe that similar questions should be asked.
The post Nature escapes the ideology of Greta and her followers appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/la-natura-sfugge-allideologia-di-greta-e-dei-suoi-follower/ on Sat, 12 Feb 2022 03:47:00 +0000.