The myth that panic, looting, and antisocial behavior increases during the apocalypse (or apocalyptic-like scenarios) is in fact a myth—and has been solidly disproved by multiple scientific studies. The National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program, a research group within the United States Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), has produced research that shows over and over again that “disaster victims are assisted first by others in the immediate vicinity and surrounding area and only later by official public safety personnel […] The spontaneous provision of assistance is facilitated by the fact that when crises occur, they take place in the context of ongoing community life and daily routines—that is, they affect not isolated individuals but rather people who are embedded in networks of social relationships.” (Facing Hazards and Disasters: Understanding Human Dimensions, National Academy of Sciences, 2006). Humans do not, under the pressure of an emergency, socially collapse. Rather, they seem to display higher levels of social cohesion, despite what media or government agents might expect…or portray on TV. Humans, after the apocalypse, band together in collectives to help one another—and they do this spontaneously. Disaster response workers call it ‘spontaneous prosocial helping behavior’, and it saves lives.
Tag: climate change
Hey, remember when environmentalist cartoons from the early 90s used to get criticised for oversimplifying complex issues because they depicted the primary drivers of pollution and climate change as a tiny group of power-mad billionaire industrialists who deliberately promote unsustainable business practices for absolutely no reason other than satisfying their weird garbage fetish?
destroying the ecosystem of the entire planet to own the libs
4˚C warming earth is the ultimate unsafe space
I am an Arctic researcher. Donald Trump is deleting my citations | Victoria Herrmann
As an Arctic researcher, I’m used to gaps in data. Just over 1% of US Arctic waters have been surveyed to modern standards. In truth, some of the maps we use today haven’t been updated since the second world war. Navigating uncharted waters can prove difficult, but it comes with the territory of working in such a remote part of the world.
Over the past two months though, I’ve been navigating a different type of uncharted territory: the deleting of what little data we have by the Trump administration.
At first, the distress flare of lost data came as a surge of defunct links on 21 January. The US National Strategy for the Arctic, the Implementation Plan for the Strategy, and the report on our progress all gone within a matter of minutes. As I watched more and more links turned red, I frantically combed the internet for archived versions of our country’s most important polar policies.
I had no idea then that this disappearing act had just begun.
Since January, the surge has transformed into a slow, incessant march of deleting datasets, webpages and policies about the Arctic. I now come to expect a weekly email request to replace invalid citations, hoping that someone had the foresight to download statistics about Arctic permafrost thaw or renewable energy in advance of the purge.
You know how people always lament the burning of the library of Alexandria? All that lost knowledge? How much greater civilization could’ve been if such knowledge hadn’t been destroyed?
We gonna keep letting that happen? 👀👀👀
Signal Boost
I am an Arctic researcher. Donald Trump is deleting my citations | Victoria Herrmann
The thing about how horrifyingly, lethally hot this summer is (across basically the entire northern hemisphere) is that yes, it is, and yet if I live for another 60 years maybe 40 of them are going to be hotter than this one. Maybe even that’s optimistic. Any acknowledgement of how bad it is right now is inseparable from the realisation that it not only can be worse, but absolutely will be worse.
I’m not saying anyone should be panicking, but I am saying that as a society, as a planet, we ought to be pouring resources into finding ways to keep people alive under these unprecedented conditions; it’s going to be one of the major public health and civil engineering challenges of this century, and we can see it coming. Yet instead, because capitalism, what we are in effect doing is pouring resources into finding ways to make these conditions worse.
That’s not acceptable.
🍓🧀 (archive) 