The sad thing about these pictures is that they only communicate the fatal scale of the destruction when it's too late. We humans can only start to see with their own eyes the signs of danger at a point when nothing can be done to save ourselves—the point when the mouth of the lion has firmly gripped the neck of the gazelle...



In the book The Dominant Animal. Human Evolution and the Environment, Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich locate this flaw (human inaction) in the way our minds have been shaped during the course of our evolution. In order to function normally, they argue, we needed to put things that aren't immediately perceived as trouble in the background our thoughts...
That aspect refers to the removal of a constant stimulus from consciousness—one may hear an air conditioner start up, but its continuing hum is soon “tuned-out.” ...Keeping the environmental background constant through habituation makes it easier to perceive new threats or opportunities as the ecological play proceeds. Our ancestors lived in situations in which that was of paramount importance, and we’re still quite good at dealing with sudden changes in our environments, be it a car swerving at us from another lane, a baby’s cry of distress....

What is this passage saying? Something like climate change does not freak us out because our basic consciousness does not have an alarm mechanism for something of that scale. A baby’s cry? Instant response; the slow rise of the oceans? We can't see or hear the problem, and so there is no or fatally slow response. How do we solve this limitation? With cultural tools that extend our perception:
The only way to recognize the change is by interpreting graphs made by scientific instruments that were designed to extend our perceptual systems and track the changes. Those graphs condense representations of changes made over many decades into visual differences occurring over the space of a few inches-changes we can perceive. A
remarkable aspect of human cultural evolution, however, is that such evolved mechanisms can be brought explicitly to people’s attention. Then humanity can corporately take them into account as it struggles deliberately and openly to alter the course of its own cultural evolution-a process that psychologist Robert Ornstein and Paul once termed “conscious evolution."
So only cultural learning (education) can bring the danger of the present situation to our immediate attention. If we look out the window, all we see are clear blue skies; if look at the same sky with cultural tools—models, mathematics, research papers, and so on—we see skies that are not at all clear. We need to see before we see with our eyes.