By @anarchyroll
What is it about important events that will actually effect all of humanity that allows it to fly under the radar? It doesn’t bleed so I guess it doesnt lead. It’s easy to blame the gatekeepers of information but in the era of internet news, is there such a thing as news/information gatekeepers?
Humans do not like thinking about their mortality. We hate acknowledging the fact that we will die. We spend billions of dollars trying to delay death and even more trying to look not as near death as we are. I suppose its natural that we also don’t want to think about the end of the world.
Just like how we are all guaranteed death, the Earth is guarenteed to meet its end one day. That day is incomprehensibly far in the future. However, the world ending and the world being uninhabitable for human beings are two very different things.
Hearing or reading about things like rising sea levels, coral bleaching, and global warming doesn’t shout out apocalypse. The Earth has withstood much worse than all three of those forces combined. Which is true. Global warming on steroids wont be the end of the Earth. The massive disruption in the food chain caused by coral bleaching wont come anywhere near the end of the world.
But apocalyptic scare tactics have never been the point of bring environmental news to the forefront of people’s attention. The Earth will be just fine. But will it be inhabitable for humans? That is a whole other story and is the issue at hand when environmentalists and NASA ring the alarm about carbon dioxide in the air, acidity in the sea and draughts on land.
We all love Earth, but we love ourselves more. Distracting ourselves from our problems is a natural part of the human condition. Without memes and gifs my slow work days would be soul dissolving. But the distractions must not continue to overshadow the purpose when we are reaching external benchmarks for disaster such as the carbon dioxide tipping point.
Anarchy Journal Constitutional 