The issue of emotional engagement is just too complicated, that’s why it’s an issue to begin with. It would be great if we all held hands and walked towards the horizon with a great new life free of problems and concerns but that’s never going to happen, and I personally hate acknowledging that but it’s true. Each of us puts our emotions in different areas. We don’t all care about the same things. Even if we reached the point where we were near death, we may all care about surviving but how we survive is a completely different issue. Some care about the people as a whole, while others care for themselves. Not saying either is wrong, but they are on different ends of a spectrum and I can’t see us bringing them together.

You brought up Civil Rights, a huge issue that we battled for decades. It really didn’t seem like the issue would be solved, but through time it did. And it only did because new people came along and realized that what they were seeing is wrong and that the actions of their ancestors greatly damaged society. I believe that will happen again, I sincerely do. But when it comes to the environment it will be much more difficult than Civil Rights. I think it has everything to do with anthropocentrism too. With Civil Rights, the oppressed could stand and speak up about the poor morality of society and get people’s attention. Plants can’t do that. Oceans can’t do that. They can’t fight for their rights; someone has to do it for them. But the majority of people aren’t going to do that unless we start to be greatly affected by the environmental issues. No matter how hard we try, we’re still being anthropocentric. And sure, that’s a bad thing, but I don’t think we can help it. If we don’t understand a certain situation, there’s no way we can sympathize with it. We do this amongst each other, so of course we do it for the environment.

So how can we get people to stand up for it? Of course, you mentioned it with education. Education truly is key, but that means the difficult task of educating everyone. Billions of people in the world, and we need to educate every last one of them because like someone in class said (I think Gidget) the Environment Issue is different from Civil Rights because this time, it involves everyone’s participation. Doesn’t matter what the color of your skin is, if you don’t care for the environment it will affect you.

But even then, people are educated with important issues all the time and they just refuse to care about it. The emotion just isn’t there. Or it is, but they care about other things more. What do you do then? How can you force emotion on people? This is why emotional engagement is just too difficult. You have people caring about the wrong things and because of it we can’t be united.

But I think there is something we can do, and it’s to have a small amount of people show the rest of us that sustainability is possible. If everyone is able to see that, then they’ll be much more likely to stand up and fight for what’s right. If New York City, with a population of millions, is able to create a sustainable society, everyone else can definitely do it. We need an example; the Civil Rights had it with nonviolence, this issue needs to have one as well and I just can’t think of one that already exists in our time. Education won’t be enough if people believe the situation is hopeless, as many people do. We need something to show us that there is still hope and that sustainability can occur, or else it just looks too far-fetched.