Most efforts trying to help with climate warming and related issues are focused on material conditions - atmospheric temperature, harvest decline, and weight of all the species on the earth.
These analyses have helped clarify the nature of the problem and some of its causes. What is not done is looking at the social causes such as the drive for profit, the organization of banking systems, the structure of media, the ontology, worldview, and class structure provided by education in public and private schools.* Education is organized in the space between classes: hallway behavior and communication, the atmosphere on playgrounds and churches or the organization, of family around the dinner table or the TV, and the armor provided by socially compromising iPhones.
Gardenworld will find itself creating new or reinstating the old structures of these events. This socialization is creating the mindset of those who will have to respond to climate change. I often find myself in some public place like the airport or McDonald's or just walking on the street and thinking, how are these people going to respond? (The people in Montenegro where I have RECENTLY lived for a couple of months in the Balkans, and now in Malaysia, are much fitter to the observant eye than in the States. People can change rapidly, but not that rapidly. I fear for them.)
*I spent 8 years, first grade through 8th, at Collegiate school in Manhattan where l learned songs (I am fairly confident that this is no longer true.) “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war” and worse: “We announced to the wandering Redskins you've got to get out of the way for Collegiate is here to stay.” A year in New Rochelle High School where the bureaucracy sorted students into five levels that did not interact except in the hallways, made me conscious of class structure, and two years in California at Glendale High where I experienced a much more level structure prepared me for something closer to the American ideal. Erich Fromm with whom I studied for three years in Mexico City, spent a lifetime, trying to understand how individuals provided the glue that held society together and how the society, provided the structure within which people could do that. He called the resulting way of engaging the world, the social character, the organization of self that allowed people to be a part of a particular society. We know the people from Japan or rural Mexico, or Dallas or Moscow are really different from each other but we're not doing much speculation on why.
I am spending time rereading Fromm's books such as Escape From Freedom and The Sane Society and will be referring to these in the next posts. I am sure that every one of you has experiences in childhood, adolescence, and college that would help you understand the social structure of the society we live in. You should be able also to gain some insight into the adult role that you fit yourself into, but it is harder to see because we are so close to it now. My understanding is that climate change will rip most of us out of the roles we currently occupy.