Shopping Our Way to Safety

[undergroundpanther]

Gordon Brown has delivered his first big speech on the environment, and Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, has given warning that if humanity doesn’t tackle climate change it will be “on the verge of a catastrophe”.

But does such high-level agonising encourage citizens to push for collective political action? No, according to Andrew Szasz, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Instead, he suggests that repeated pronouncements have bred a “strange, new mutant form of environmentalism” in which we protect ourselves through the stuff we consume. He calls this isolationist behaviour “inverted quarantine”.

So, if we suspect toxins in the environment, we buy organic food and bottled water in a bid to protect ourselves, instead of campaigning for toxin levels to be reduced for all. In the face of rising crime, we retreat nervously into expensive gated communities instead of pushing for safer streets.

These individual responses to threats, Szasz argues in a new book, Shopping Our Way to Safety, militate against political action. “We become anaesthetised. People believe they’ve solved the problem, therefore they’re less likely to line up and advocate for more political responses.”


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anjana_ahuja/article2943260.ece

Which again,brings up the just world theory.
We all know the world is NOT just, but in some people their actions demonstrate a profound socially reinforced delusion that keeps things unjust.
http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v3n2/justworld.html