Eyes Wide Open: List 1

The soundtrack turned ominous.

We’ve just crossed a new threshold: seven billion and counting.

Edward Jenner’s 1796 inoculation against smallpox was the first giant step in controlling disease, leading to the vaccines you received when you were young and the antibiotics at your pharmacy.

What’s certain is that providing that many people with the necessities and luxuries of life from finite resources ties population to every other environmental issue.

New finds offer huge new supplies, but demand outside of the West has grown so large that scarcity is still an issue. Suddenly, though, it’s been trumped by side effects.

Nuclear power comes with staggering costs and dangers: radioactive wastes, worries over making nuclear weapons, and safety, especially after a 2011 earthquake and tsunami caused radiation releases from reactors in Fukushima, Japan.

Its huge harvests come from monocultures—growing large numbers of the same thing in one place.

If we keep burning fossil fuels, we’re headed for global disaster. The good news: unlike an Earth-bound asteroid, we inadvertently made this problem and ought to be able to unmake it.

Fossil fuels permeate our lives.

Mitigation (reducing the causes by cutting carbon emissions) and adaptation (preparing for the effects) have lately been joined by research in improving our situation through geoengineering projects like whitening clouds to reflect more of the sun’s rays.

To gain jobs and a share of the West’s enviable lifestyle, millions have left their homes in developing countries for Europe, Australia, and the United States.

No tool in your mental kit has more power to weigh the worth of statements or reveal the source of actions than the ability to spot vested interests. These are the stakes—the financial or emotional investment—we have in an idea, a policy, a business, a political party.

You’d no doubt belong to a trade group that would hire lobbyists to fight such laws.

Impartial investigators have nothing to gain from their particular findings.

When powerful people or institutions are accused of misconduct—from army massacres and police brutality cases to clergy sex-abuse scandals and cyclist Lance Armstrong’s use of performance-enhancing drugs—the first reaction is almost always to refute the charge, no matter how accurate.

“I want you all to stonewall it. Let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else....”

Their solution: front groups. These inject industries’ views into public discourse without revealing their source.

Coming up with deceiving names for groups expressly to fool the public is an art the PR industry has perfected.

You’ll find these names at the bottoms of campaign fliers, beneath the pro and con arguments in voters’ guides, and included in articles and blog posts to give support from seemingly unbiased sources.

To earn their profits, fossil-fuel businesses have invested trillions of dollars in oil rigs and supertankers, mines and gas stations, refineries and pipelines.

If climate worries spur politicians to tax carbon emissions, push conservation, or speed a switch to other fuels, those trillions will earn back far less money and turn out to be a poor investment.

This is as true on Wall Street and in Congress as it is in high-school cliques. Powerful interests fight to keep their standing.

Deadly beasts still rouse us, the reason the web teems with videos of attacks by everything from great white sharks to rabid squirrels.

Changes with fluctuations (like climate) or that are gradual can go unseen.

Our minds can give up when facing too much complexity. Or not, since we’re also endowed with persistence.

Our brains are strongly inclined toward the clear-cut even when situations are anything but.

Having employees work on a single task instead of making an entire product is wonderfully efficient. One of the downsides: employees tend to know only a sliver of what goes on.

The same is true of specialization within societies. With only 2 percent of the U.S. population in agriculture, 98 percent of us never see our food being raised.

If we saw the oil slicks and child labor that lie behind some of our purchases, we might think twice—the reason ad images are fun-filled, soothing, and often set in an earlier era. In Adland, the air is unpolluted, families are close, and people are often in a state of elation.

Taxes, regulation, research funding, and safety standards are some of the ways governments change what’s available. They don’t usually act without prodding.

But the environmental peril is different—a calamity that’s mainly in the future.

The unborn don’t vote, hire lobbyists, or lead protests, and it shows; they, like future threats, go on our brain’s back burner.

Britain exploited its North Sea oil.

You can see it in the generous government subsidies still being given to oil and gas companies.

You can find it as well in the words of U.S. politicians, who regard talk of conservation as taboo.