Popular Carbon Awareness

Industrial consumerism has generated a broad spectrum of products that are either shaped by non-renewable energy and/or made out of plastics that were once unrefined crude oil.

Because many people live in a mostly-artificial world of human-made products within a built-environment of concrete, steel, glass, asphalt, etc. it may be hard to visualize how all this human-made industrial environment is related to the living ecosystems, made mostly of carbon, that are cleared away for raw materials from which certain parts of the human-made environment are produced.

Living ecosystems of the past were also converted into the crude oil to make the plastics and energy of the human-made environment, but because that process occurred naturally and over a time span that extends long before humans existed, let alone industrialism, it is hard to think about those ancient ecosystems being used by us today in the same way future humans will use biosediments from our present-day ecosystems.

Climate awareness has led more people to be more aware of how the many consumer goods and (transportation) services they buy and use are connected with the larger carbon/energy cycle; but still I think somehow that many if not most people are able to completely divorce their minds from such carbon-awareness when they shift gears to focusing on 'other issues.'

I put 'other issues' in quotations because if you think about it, most if not all of our human-made issues are actually themselves products of the carbon/energy cycle, only we have reshaped the natural world to appear as something totally separate from the raw materials it is made out of.

Sewers, for example, evolved from canals, which themselves evolved from natural rivers and streams. Cities and suburbs evolved from forests as more and more wood and stone were harvested from the land and made into human structures. Cars and truck evolved from wagons pulled by horses and other animals.

In some ways, these technological developments reduced the human burden on surface carbon-energy processes, e.g. as horses no longer needed to be fed to pull wagons, yet on the other hand, motor-vehicles motorized to use 100 times the power of a horse by consuming carbon-fuels that were refined from crude oil sedimented over vast periods of geological time in comparison with grass fed to horses that would be grown in the same year the horse consumed it.

While popular awareness of carbon and energy has grown as a result of climate discourse, I think there is still a disconnect between different states of mind in which other issues eclipse awareness of carbon. For some reason, the human mind has evolved to frame and compartmentalize different aspects of the same reality as if they were separate for the sake of simplification, and so we have a hard time combining these separated framings into a single unified perspective on reality.

When you shop, for example, are you simultaneously thinking about how the ingredients of your food are grown? When you pump gas, are you thinking about the crude oil, how it was formed geologically, how it was drilled and refined, and how it ends up in the atmosphere after leaving your tailpipe? Are you thinking about the crude oil and other raw materials that things you buy, wear, etc. are made out of?

In a way, the thing that has made industrial-consumerism so successful is the ability to to grant us the illusion that we live in a totally artificial reality separate from the natural world. Today, we can drive to a natural area and then drive out of it back to the city and feel like we have control over two completely separate realities. In reality, it is all the same reality; but we like the feeling that it's not, because that gives us a sense of transcendence that has enchanted us since maybe even before the dawn of religion.

Anyway, this post is rambling, but please share your thoughts on popular awareness of carbon/energy as people experience their daily lives as part of the carbon/energy cycle of the planet and/or separate from it. It is interesting that modern humans are simultaneously bathed in technology and somewhat in scientific understanding, and yet we also enjoy a privilege of illusion that is created for us by industrial-consumerism to live in a simpler reality than the one that actually supports our existence.