The next few days my time will be spent in a conference on Climate and Philosophy. Quite obviously, recent hurricanes are on people’s minds. Neither Gordon nor Helene should pose a threat to the United States.One of the presenters is from the University of West Florida. I feel for the guy, I really do. Last year (or was it the year before) that school shut down for an entire semester because of a hurricane (the one that knocked out part of I-10, pre-Katrina). But his fixation reminds me of the kind of ego-centric freak out that most folks have to storms. I am not meaning to accuse him of the kind of egocentricism that we deplore. Just that folks have a tendency to take their personal experiences and make them the focus of all future discussion. We do this all the time. I’m doing it right now. But what I worry about is that we take our sudden fear of things like hurricanes to be the motivating force for change. It leaves us pursuing ends that constantly changing based on what events have affected us. It makes us ingnore external, universal problems for immediate, personal ones. Its the kind of thing that causes folks to ignore the danger of hurricanes because a hurricane hasn’t hit where they live but then, when a storm does hit, they wonder where everyone’s previous concern for hurricanes was.
blah blah blah, time for lunch.
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