"Still, we insulate ourselves from the disorientation and alarm in other, more pernicious ways, too. We seem able to normalize catastrophes as we absorb them, a phenomenon that points to what Peter Kahn, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, calls “environmental generational amnesia.” Each generation, Kahn argues, can recognize only the ecological changes its members witness during their lifetimes. When we spoke recently, Kahn pointed to the living conditions in megacities like Kolkata, or in the highly polluted, impoverished areas affected by Houston’s oil refineries, where he conducted his initial research in the early ’90s. In Houston, Kahn found that two-thirds of the children he interviewed understood that air and water pollution were environmental issues. But only one-third believed their neighborhood was polluted. “People are born into this life,” Kahn told me, “and they think it’s normal.”"
Kahn calls our environmental generational amnesia “one of the central psychological problems of our lifetime,” because it obscures the magnitude of so many concrete problems. You can wind up not looking away, exactly, but zoomed in too tightly to see things for what they are. Still, the tide is always rising in the background, swallowing something. And the longer you live, the more anxiously trapped you may feel between the losses already sustained and the ones you see coming.
On some level, we’ll live on, in exile.
Such shifting baselines muddle the idea of adaptation to climate change, too. Adaptation, Kahn notes, can mean anything from the human eye’s adjusting to a darker environment within a few milliseconds to wolves’ changing into dogs over thousands of years. It doesn’t always mean progress, he told me; “it’s possible to adapt and diminish the quality of human life.” Adapting to avoid or cope with the suffering wrought by climate change might gradually create other suffering. And because of environmental generational amnesia, we might never fully recognize its extent. Think of how Shel Silverstein’s Giving Tree, nimbly accommodating each of the boy’s needs, eventually winds up a stump.
On the most fundamental level, Kahn argues, we are already adapting to climate change through a kind of tacit acquiescence, the way people in a city like Beijing accept that simply breathing the air outside can make them sick. “People are aware — they’re coughing and wheezing,” he told me, “but they’re not staging political revolutions.” Neither are we. And, Kahn went on, we risk imprisoning ourselves, through gradual adaptation, into a condition of “unfulfilled flourishing.” A wolf becomes a dog, genetically; it wants to fetch tennis balls and sleep at the foot of your bed. But imagine a dog that isn’t yet a dog, that still wants to be a wolf.
Sure, I told him, but at some point it would all be too much. Potentially, Kahn said. But assumptions about the future, no matter how self-evident they may feel, don’t automatically come true. “The amazing thing is that none of this seems to work the way we think it should. When I was growing up in the Bay Area in the 1970s, the traffic was really bad. And I said, If it just gets a little bit worse, you’re going to have a major upheaval in consciousness. And every five years it got worse.” He went silent for a second, then continued, “I’m just thinking about how many five-year periods I’ve lived through.”
Permit me to make a few points;
1. Here is Professor Kahn's paper based on interviews with 24 people in Houston.
2. Note that there is "no supply side" here. Where are the entrepreneurs seeking out solutions? Where is Google? Where is the profit motive?
3. We live in the age of cell phones and Youtube. More than ever, people have full information about the risks where they currently live and what they would gain from living in other areas where they have never lived before. I think about USC and how much information about what it is like to live on campus vs what I knew back in 1984 and was applying to college.
4. The Bay Area traffic case is interesting but this is an example of politics (not allowing road pricing by time of day) not economics impeding the policy solution.
While I like this piece, please note the "Doom and Gloom". The NY Times loves this theme that we are on a "highway to hell".
5. Note Kahn's certainty that we all suffer from the biases he claims to have identified. In an age of diversity, do people differ with respect to their having these biases? What % of people have these traits? If enough people have "rational expectations", how does this demand affect the markets for migration and innovation? Read my 2017 paper!
We make the same point about China's air pollution problems in our 2016 book. The demand for solutions incentivizes both firms and local governments to take steps to address the issue.
6. They have now included Brad Plumer as one of their new writers. I hope he adds some intellectual balance to this group. Their climate coverage has been remarkably slanted. In a nutshell, all Paul Ehrlich and not one drop of Julian Simon!
Now that I have read the work by the psychologist named "Kahn", I think he should reciprocate and should read some work by the economist named "Kahn" and start with this easy piece.