Last week I finally sat down to watch An Inconvenient Truth with my family. I'd been meaning to since before its theatrical debut, but I hadn't made it a priority.
Perhaps I should have.
I've been sold on the topic of global warming since I was in elementary school. I had the good fortune of being part of the TAG (Talented And Gifted) program there which put me in a classroom with a number of other children who had diverse intellectual interests (no doubt instilled in them by their parents) once a week. This is where I first heard about climate change from a few other students (whale saving, tree hugging, nine year olds whom I had the biggest crushes on and admired greatly), and it began to figure prominently as a topic of conversation for the often student guided class. To be frank, it scared me. And I filed it in the back of my head as something to act on in the future.
Looking back, I'm beginning to draw some lines between early exposure to such ideas, and my later interests. As a sci-fi fan, I've always been fascinated by cyberpunks seemingly dystopian post-apocolyptic futures. (I say seemingly, because cyberpunk isn't as much a dystopion vision as much as an anarchist utopian vision.) For myself, cyberpunk speaks to the resiliency of the human race. It speaks of hope for our continues survival in the face of cataclysm and tragedy caused by our careless advancement into a technologically advanced race. In these scenarios, humanity is often propelled into such futures by economic forces with little regard to what makes us truly human. It's only after the apparent apocalypse that people discover their humanity through technology, and fight to regain shreds of a world they once took for granted.
I think this is also why the game Chrono Trigger had such a huge impact on my development. Time-travel being the major mechanic in the story, the consequences of individual actions throughout history were very apparent as you progressed. Often, these individual actions had global consequences. In the fictional world Chrono Trigger takes place in, time travel is a god-given gift which grants the protagonists the ability to understand why the world ends up in the dying state it is in the year 2300. Unfortunately for us, we don't have the luxury to go back in time and fix our mistakes.
We do however have mathematical models which help us extrapolate what our future might look like, and things aren't looking so good right now. Hindsight may be 20/20, but what's that saying about deaf ears...?
Following the industrial revolution, technology has gotten a bad rap for being dehumanizing. Technology isn't dehumanizing, humans are dehumanizing. Technology represents the epitome of what we are and what we can be at any given moment.
So the question we should ask now is, how can we utilize our technology to start trying to fix problems such as climate change? It starts with finding our humanity; finding our humanity reflected back at us through our technology, and most importantly, finding the our humanity in others.
No one's really talking about it, but there's a major philosophical phase shift that the internet and social media is bringing about in our collective subconscious'. Following the industrial revolution, technology was thought of as dehumanizing. Now, we're starting to see that it's becoming potentially re-humanizing. We're connecting in new ways like never before. Doing things collectively like never before.
Watching An Inconvenient Truth, our situation seemed hopeless. But then looking out at the vast net, I'm suddenly filled with lots of hope.
