Assignment #3

At least since former vice president Al Gore's movie and his around the world promotion tour, the climate change reached the public at large. It became part of daily discussion in the media. Global warming was last years top topic. You had the sense that a new era began and people began to think over their behavior towards the nature. Politics followed new goals like the reduction of CO2 emissions, supporting the research and development of renewable energies and more. Not at least after this important topic was replaced by the financial crisis it seems to be that we still didn't realized the scope of this enormous issue. May be we just refuse to believe it. But why are we making heavy weather of accepting the truth of global warming?

At first it's important to note, that for us living in western, or middle Europe the pollution of our environment seems to be a bettered part of our last century's history. It's hard to catch side of obvious misdemeanors against nature in our latitudinal lines. Examples like the disastrous conditions in some parts of western and eastern Germany where coal mining was the number one employer in the region past from our view within closing most of the mines because of inefficiency. The expansion of the European Union caused a measurable improvement of environmental conditions in eastern Europe. We started to be proud of how green now we are. But in fact it's just an example of a simple old rule. “Out of sight, out of mind”. We started to export our trash and our old environment soiling technology to other parts of the world. The far away the better. So we could feel like the saviors of the world. But not much changed. Growing countries like China and India are using our sorted out technology ad nauseam. Millions of old cars blaring out tons of CO2 were shipped to African countries. Now, some years later, when the facts are on the table we presume to reprimand all these countries because of their low environment protection standards.

Nevertheless we were now compelled by the financial crisis to show our true colors. All the goals which were raised to the highest goals of our next decades ended in smoke. Once again it became obvious what the most important of all our issues is. Money. Ideas like shutting down all of Germany's atomic plants are gone with the wind. Instead of improvements of the public traffic systems our Governments are now paying money to everybody who buys a new car, just to safe some old fashioned undiscerning car industry. Sure a lot of people are dependent on these jobs, but it seems to be the wrong way, because we are just decelerating the destruction of our planet instead of trying to stop this destruction.

This big influence of money on our decisions for or against our nature are not just visible in world politics. It's visible in every household. We still try to find cheaper and cheaper products in the supermarkets and shopping malls. Just some of us realized that there must be something wrong when Strawberries from the south of Spain are cheaper than the local ones. We are happy about a bargain buy at the expense of our nature and not at least at the expense of people working for a pittance.

To summarize it all to a point in my opinion it leads all to the theory of “out of sight, out of mind”. Until we will not be haunted more and more by enormous natural disasters, animal diseases and all the thereby connected problems we will not stop our way of living and the destructible behavior. We don't want to believe it. Like little children we need to feel the pain of getting burned until we believe that fire is dangerous.