Monday, June 26, 2017

David Suzuki & GM [Guy McPherson]- Abrupt Climate Change - Compassion in the Face of Death

(Edited for clarity at 6 PM Seattle time)  

The video below starts out with a scene featuring American scientist Guy McPherson and continues with other interspersed scenes of doctors and patients confronting the end of individual lives. This is apparently intended to provide a context for the major issue of today--human extinction. Most of the video consists of an interview by Peter Mansbridge of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) with Canadian scientist David Suzuki regarding climate destabilization. At one point Suzuki makes reference to Guy McPherson who among scientists represents a more pessimistic view of near term human extinction due to human-caused destabilization of our planet's biosphere.

I think it is a mistake, as in the video, to compare the interspersed scenes of individuals facing death with that of the entire human race facing extinction. I think this actually trivializes the issue. Individuals have known death (as well as birth) for the past 150,000 years of human existence, but human extinction is of a vaster different scale of tragedy. I think this treatment illustrates the extreme individualism throughout Western capitalist civilization in which self-centeredness in addition to greed and manipulation of others for private gain have been essentially transformed into virtues.