Only skimmed Losing Earth admittedly (long) but my view is that you can't blame human nature without either invoking some mysterious 'X' quality which inherently drives all human being to ecologically destructive behaviour or else admit pluralism about human nature.
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& if you admit pluralism about human nature you probably have to admit that there are less destructive ways of life human beings are capable of & that destructive behaviours have been selected for or encouraged by particular political economic and cultural conditions.
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The article goes out of its way to deny that particular political and economic institutions are to blame for hamstringing climate action, but if other greener ways of life are possible, this forces us to consider political economic reformation as a means to climate action.
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In the epilogue we have: "Human nature has brought us to this place; perhaps human nature will one day bring us through. Rational argument has failed in a rout. Let irrational optimism have a turn. It is also human nature, after all, to hope".
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This seems to admit the possibility that human nature is plural and that we can harness our better inclinations towards keeping the planet cooler. So politics and economics might be rather important after all, and we can't just blame human nature in general.
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This is all before considering the uneven responsibility for emissions between first world and third world, rich and poor, and between the military-industrial complex and everyone else.
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If sub-Saharans and rural Indians living on a $1 a day are as responsible for climate change as oil company CEOs, then why blame only humans, why not also blame farting cattle, sapling-eating goats and methane-emitting rice paddies? And volcanoes too!
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You can get very deep into some weird new materialist nonsense if you deny the importance of intentions and conflate causal linkage with causal agency and responsibility.
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My non-nuanced opinion is that while people as a group can be more or less bad over time, the form of governance can allow for their angels or demons to manifest more or less. I think a proportional voting system in US would ease political dysfunction also campaign finance reform
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One small example, if the US had had a Christian Party that could viably express itself in the 1980s (through proportional voting), then this: "the eighties were when the new right consolidated power " wouldn't have happened to the same extent.
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