What Environmental Reporting Leaves Out

[AverageJoe90]

19. I do very well realize there are problems, but.....

Last edited Wed Oct 10, 2012, 11:40 PM - Edit history (1)

"Other factors include things like the rising EROEI of oil, the length of supply chains, the need for computer networks to make JIT work, the complexity of global legal, political and financial systems, the eradication of species from random positions in the web of life, the trade webs that make global commerce function, the satellite networks that provide weather and position information, the increasing scarcity of phosphorus and rare earth metals, the unpredictable intrusions into the genomes of many species by genetic engineers, the draw-down of fossil aquifers, the impacts of different educational and religious systems in every country on the planet, and on and on.

All this stuff is interconnected, and creates a system of such profound complexity that chaotic results are literally inevitable. In fact, this chaos is happening all around you right now. The reason you don't recognize it for what it is, is that the human brain has such good adaptive abilities that we interpret the chaos as normal in order to keep from blowing our own minds. This is a good ability if we wish to remain upright and functional in the real world, but it's not so helpful if what we need is to distinguish threatening chaos from the normal kind. Our adaptive mental abilities mask the very changes we need to see."

It is indeed true that we live in a very complex world, and many of us, myself included, may forget this from time to time. However, though, I can say that while things are bad, they are not quite as bad as some may think.
If we focus on too many tiny details we run the risk of not being able to see the big picture. And sadly, too many people on this particular section of the forum it seems, are sort of guilty of that to a degree(I'm not going to name names, though.), from time to time. What worries me, is what could happen if too many mixed messages get sent out; will the public tune out en masse, instead of just skeptics and deniers?