Krugman writes:

Environmentalism began as a response to pollution that everyone could see. The spill in the gulf recalls the 1969 blowout that coated the beaches of Santa Barbara in oil. But 1969 was also the year the Cuyahoga River, which flows through Cleveland, caught fire. Meanwhile, Lake Erie was widely declared “dead,” its waters contaminated by algal blooms. And major U.S. cities — especially, but by no means only, Los Angeles — were often cloaked in thick, acrid smog.

It wasn’t that hard, under the circumstances, to mobilize political support for action. The Environmental Protection Agency was founded, the Clean Water Act was enacted, and America began making headway against its most visible environmental problems. Air quality improved: smog alerts in Los Angeles, which used to have more than 100 a year, have become rare. Rivers stopped burning, and some became swimmable again. And Lake Erie has come back to life, in part thanks to a ban on laundry detergents containing phosphates.

Yet there was a downside to this success story.

For one thing, as visible pollution has diminished, so has public concern over environmental issues...

...This decline in concern would be fine if visible pollution were all that mattered — but it isn’t, of course. In particular, greenhouse gases pose a greater threat than smog or burning rivers ever did. But it’s hard to get the public focused on a form of pollution that’s invisible, and whose effects unfold over decades rather than days.

Politico:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday reversed his support for offshore drilling in the wake of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Speaking at a press conference in Sacramento, Schwarzenegger said his mind was changed over the weekend while watching media reports of the spill.

“You turn on the television and see this enormous disaster, you say to yourself, ‘Why would we want to take on that kind of risk?’” Schwarzenegger said.


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What is it that separates the mind of the 19th century from all others before it? It begins to believe in real, physical things that cannot be seen. Not seeing something does not mean it does not exist or that it's supernatural. The unseen is as real as the seen. The unseen can also be more real than the seen. What is seen is more and more the illusion (a beautiful sunset); what is unseen, more and more the truth (photons). The 19th century opens a path that leads us out of naive realism. Darwin wrote:

When we look at the plants and bushes clothing an entangled bank, we are tempted to attribute their proportional numbers and kinds to what we call chance. But how false a view is this!
It is no coincidence that the century that learns to live with the unseen is also the century that invents detective fiction.


The fact the seen has so much power in the 21st century is something to worry about. Indeed, how can the governor of one of the largest economies in the world be so dependent on what he sees with his very own eyes. How can anyone be a naive realist in our day and age—"the age of science and technology"? Because you see the sea is blue, because you do not see an oil slick approaching shore does not mean the sea is not sick. This kind of thinking (believing in the unseen) was established in the 19th century, yet so many in this century have reverted to naive realism: "I know it when I see it." How did this happen? Why this regression? Krugman has a way to the answer:

As the photogenic crises of the 1960s and 1970s faded from memory, conservatives began pushing back against environmental regulation.

Much of the pushback took the form of demands that environmental restrictions be weakened. But there was also an attempt to construct a narrative in which advocates of strong environmental protection were either extremists — “eco-Nazis,” according to Rush Limbaugh — or effete liberal snobs trying to impose their aesthetic preferences on ordinary Americans. (I’m sorry to say that the long effort to block construction of a wind farm off Cape Cod — which may finally be over thanks to the Obama administration — played right into that caricature.)

To make some sense of this return to naive realism we need to turn to the theories of Jacques Rancière. Something like his "distribution of the sensible" is at work in all of this. Meaning, we are dealing with a politics of the seen and unseen. The emphasis on seeing is not innocent or accidental but directed by specific interests in the upper parts of the society. They want us to believe in the seen—this is where Rancière steps in. But if we take a step back from Rancière, we see that beneath the distribution of the sensible, there is also the distribution of the seen and unseen, the sensible and insensible. Those in power prefer the domination of the sensible, and this preference has to do precisely with the pliability of the sensible. The rise of the insensible has corresponded with the diminishing (or decentering) of the human.