There's no question in my mind that global-warming stories that ended in apocalypse were only harmful to the cause. I'm not sure why that's true, when apocalyptic stories about Russian nukes and terrorists worked so well, but it's so.
I wouldn't mind reading some work some time about why apocalypse fiction is so popular - at least a dozen movies in the post-nuclear-apocalypse world like Road Warrior, and when those wore thin, the Zombie Apocalypse was broken out. I've got my own theory, which is that a lot of people really don't like their boring jobs in a big societal machine that requires enormous division-of-labour, so that half of us barely understand what good our jobs do.
No way to feed 8 billion without it, though; if your heart longs for a simpler life where you understand where your food comes from, where you can directly control your odds of prosperity (and your job doesn't vanish because of a hedge fund on another continent) you have to get rid of all those people and be able to live in a shotgun shack. Preferably with 1000 people's worth of existing manufactured goods you can, ah, salvage.
I noticed that people jumped up in forums to discuss how you'd best flourish in Zombieland, same as people piped up to help Andy Weir write The Martian. Very creative enthusiasms.
People with a full belly and a warm house are very hard to rouse to action. Most political rhetoric goes over the top. But an analysis of this should start with Hofstader's "Paranoid Style in American Politics", which for me, has a key phrase in how the paranoid-style people are always "mounting the battlements of civilization", fighting a desperate fight for American survival, not for the 5% lower upper-income tax rate they actually get.
Hofstader's 'paranoid style' is all about the apocalyptic story, rather than the "this election is another minor tweak to our laws" story.
There's no question in my mind that global-warming stories that ended in apocalypse were only harmful to the cause. I'm not sure why that's true, when apocalyptic stories about Russian nukes and terrorists worked so well, but it's so.
I wouldn't mind reading some work some time about why apocalypse fiction is so popular - at least a dozen movies in the post-nuclear-apocalypse world like Road Warrior, and when those wore thin, the Zombie Apocalypse was broken out. I've got my own theory, which is that a lot of people really don't like their boring jobs in a big societal machine that requires enormous division-of-labour, so that half of us barely understand what good our jobs do.
No way to feed 8 billion without it, though; if your heart longs for a simpler life where you understand where your food comes from, where you can directly control your odds of prosperity (and your job doesn't vanish because of a hedge fund on another continent) you have to get rid of all those people and be able to live in a shotgun shack. Preferably with 1000 people's worth of existing manufactured goods you can, ah, salvage.
I noticed that people jumped up in forums to discuss how you'd best flourish in Zombieland, same as people piped up to help Andy Weir write The Martian. Very creative enthusiasms.
People with a full belly and a warm house are very hard to rouse to action. Most political rhetoric goes over the top. But an analysis of this should start with Hofstader's "Paranoid Style in American Politics", which for me, has a key phrase in how the paranoid-style people are always "mounting the battlements of civilization", fighting a desperate fight for American survival, not for the 5% lower upper-income tax rate they actually get.
Hofstader's 'paranoid style' is all about the apocalyptic story, rather than the "this election is another minor tweak to our laws" story.