repeating falsehoods like incantations

From Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud:

An irony of our technological advancement is that it has created a society that is in many ways scientifically more naive than the preindustrial world, in which no citizen who learned physics through backbreaking work and understood climate through subsistence agriculture would have assumed that he or she was exempt from the laws of nature. The “modern” kind of magical thinking is characterized by the belief that repeating falsehoods like incantations can transform them into scientific truth. It is also yoked to a quasi-mystical faith in the free market, which, according to the prophets, will somehow allow us to live beyond our means indefinitely.

p164

A very accessible and relevant introduction to geology in the context of the Anthropocene. Also calmly but firmly refutes pretty much every geoengineering “solution” in circulation, and offers short shrift to the methadone of (B)CCS.

Posted

in

,

Comments and pingbacks

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post’s permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post’s URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)