One of my classes for my Ecology Degree is an Environmental future planning class and it's bleak, folks. Here are some highlights of the ideas my professor has put forward for planning for the future:
Using AI to help predict all the natural disasters. Because AI is totally going to save us folks.
Floating Parks. Lol.
More bike lanes even though we live in a part of the country that is massively spread out, unbearably hot, humid and hilly. Sure mate, I'm going to bike my 2 hour by car commute on a bike in sauna conditions.
Ride share companies where you pay a subscription instead of owning a car because yeah sure private companies getting more money and the public owning less ourselves is totally the solution instead of JUST MAKING IT PUBLIC TRANSPORT FFS WE HAD TRAMS IN THE 1900s AND THEY WORKED FINE.
Asking right-wingers really nicely to take climate change seriously.
Yet another Paris agreement style thing asking countries to commit to a weak target that they'll just ignore anyway.
Really depressing shit like "Ok so climate change is inevitable so what are some ways we can adapt to constant natural disasters and food scarcity." Like not even planning to fix it or prevent it. Just accepting it as "well it's going to happen nothing we can do." when we sure as fuck should be doing whatever possible to avoid such a future (but of course we can't, because the only solution is communism and assertive resistance and liberals would rather kill the entire global ecosystem than actively fight for survival)
So basically if you want insight on how liberals are going to deal with climate change the answer is about as well as they did with COVID. So basically limp half solutions that they give up on in the spirit of comprising with reactionaries with a focus on mild damage control rather than prevention and repair.
The sad thing is that that the students themselves are putting forward actually good solutions that are communist without realising they're communist, but the lecturer just kind of smiles and nods and goes on to the next topic as if to say "Yes you're right but I can't say it because I work for capitalists."
The more I study the more apparent it becomes that there is no way a capitalist system can fight this. The west cannot fight this even though it's people know the solutions they simply can't do them due to the oppressive nature of our system. Thank god for China because it's looking bad otherwise.
studying ecology and modern issues at the intersection of society/nature was a big shove into Marxism for me too.
lots of classes describing and articulating with terrifying accuracy about how fucked we were, how resilient natural systems could be if we stopped actively and increasingly choking them to death, etc. and witnessing the complete lack of realistic solutions within the dominant ideological frame of privatization, individualism etc.
I was in an interdisciplinary program which had a cluster in actual social sciences (beyond the dismal science of economics in the US) so I had just enough understanding and connections to that "other" side of campus and found myself making friends with students over there and learning about their weird conferences.
after attending one and realizing how 1) everyone was talking about real life problems and case studies the hard-science-only ecologists ignore or are uncomfortable talking about 2) everyone was using all this shorthand jargon I didn't know and I realized it was "marx" who I had heard of, of course, but never actually read. I was in favor of socialism already, as socialist programs made sense, universal rights, common interests, etc. I just wanted to keep up with the dialogue and conversations these people were having about theories of land, ownership, workers, power, so I found David Harvey's lecture series online and that changed everything. it was a real struggle, but once things started to click, it was like a train picking up momentum. like the thread one pulls on that keeps going until an entire fascade and constructed understanding unravels completely. the magic dispels in an instant, and all we are left with is the horror of what is and the beauty of what might be.
now my love for the land and its peoples is as pure as my hate for capitalism, colonialism, and empire.