EDITORIAL
2 Obiter Dicta
Without Great Power Comes Little Responsibility
It’s not our fault; saving the world from climate change just
isn’t in our nature
T
her e’s nothing ter r ibly sexy or salacious to be found in talks of environmental degradation or resource depletion—and
rest assured, you likely won’t be the life of
the party as you enlighten your guests on the disastrous effects of oil spills, acid rain, and urban runoff.
In fact, for many people, environmental issues
take a back seat to other pressing matters such as
picking up the kids from school on time, checking Twitter feeds, and clearing the lint trap in the
dryer. A poll conducted by Abacus Data back in
August 2014 found that only twenty-three per cent
of Canadians listed the environment as one of their
top three concerns, below health care (fifty-one
per cent), job creation (thirty-four per cent), taxes
(thirty-two per cent), debt/deficit (twenty-nine per
cent), and accountability and trust (twenty-five per
cent). When we consider all the media coverage and
political attention that environmental issues have
received, it might lead us to ask why people don’t
appear to be more concerned about it. Why is the
catastrophic impact of global warming met with the
same concern as whether or not a dress is white and
gold or blue and black?
I would like to think that if Hollywood has taught
us nothing else, it’s that when our planet faces the
threat of annihilation—whether it be the result of
hostile alien invaders or wayward meteors—its citizens immediately respond by rolling up their sleeves,
pulling up their bootstraps, and taking action to the
inspirational soundtrack of Aerosmith’s “I Don’t
Want to Miss a Thing.” That is the sort of answer that
pop culture and mainstream media have conditioned
me to expect in situations where our society faces its
own destruction. Yet, with equal parts surprise and
confusion, instead I see the development of a culture
which has come to easily justify meeting these issues
with either intense skepticism or detachment from
the situation altogether. Despite the fact that climate
change no longer stands as a ‘theory’ and has in large
majority been accepted by relevant experts as fact,
skeptics persist on muddying the discourse with
their fuzzy logic, and a pandemic form of apathy has
left many paralyzed by inaction. I don’t believe that
there is one single cause to explain this but rather it
is the cumulative result of a number of factors that
work against our human nature.
Our irrational behaviour can readily be explained
by the psychological shortcomings that continue to
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editorial board
editor-in-chief | Karolina Wisniewski
managing editor | Sam Michaels
layout editor | Heather Pringle
ê Photo credit: OccupyCorporation.org
plague the human mind. There are a litany of cognitive biases that affect our ability to make rational
decisions including ambiguity effect, confirmation bias, framing effect, and loss aversion. In situations where there is a deviation from the expected
response, the result can often be one of these cognitive biases. According to Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, the human brain
isn’t wired to respond easily to large, slow-moving
threats. As he explains, “our brain is essentially a
get-out-of-the-way machine. That’s why we can
duck a baseball in milliseconds.”
This line of reasoning might sound familiar to
those of you who jumped on the Thinking, Fast
and Slow bandwagon several years ago. The author,
Daniel Kahneman, introduced readers to the two
systems driving the way we think: system 1 (fast,
intuitive, and emotional), and system 2 (slow,
editorial staff
business managers | Alvin Qian,
Adam Cepler
communications manager | Carla Marti
copy editor | Subban Jama
news editor | Mike Capitano
opinions editor | Carla Marti
arts & culture editor | Marie Park
sports editor | Evan Ivkovic
website editor | Asad Akhtar
staff writers
Kate Henley, Gleb Matushansky, Erin Garbett,
Hannah de Jong, Kenneth Cheak Kwan Lam,
Kendall Grant, Rob Hamilton,
Esther Mendelsohn, Parmbir Singh Gill,
deliberate, and logical). System 1 is our default; it’s
automatic and takes little effort to use. It doesn’t
seek to come up with the best solution, just one
that’s good enough. As a result, it also gives rise
to the majority of cognitive errors we experience.
On the other hand, system 2 is better at methodically developing more rational solutions. However,
Kahneman describes us as instinctively lazy thinkers, often preferring to rely on system 1’s ability to
just quickly get the job done. What all of this suggests is that, not only do we find it difficult to perceive the long-term events of climate change as
threats requiring our immediate attention, but in
responding to these issues we also depend heavily
on a system of thinking that is inherently susceptible to faulty reasoning.
Michael Silver, Nabila Khan, Benjamin
Hognestad, Justin Philpott, Liane Langstaff
contributors
Douglas Judson, Zach D’Onofrio, Amy
Brubacher, Rachel McPherson-Duncan,
Michael L, Ryan Robski
Submissions for the April 6 issue are
due at 5pm on March 27, and should be
submitted to: [email protected]
The Obiter Dicta is published biweekly
during the school year, and is printed by
Weller Publishing Co. Ltd.
» see editorial, page 21
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“Beware of hard constructions and strained
inferences, for there is no worse torture than
that of laws.” francis bacon