OPINION: Will We Change Our Behaviour or Fall Victim to Lucretius?

In Fire Weather, John Vaillant references the “Lucretius Problem,” a concept I had not encountered before. 

Simply put, Lucretius said that we have a hard time imagining something bigger or worse than we have already seen or experienced. In Antifragile the author Nassim Taleb writes, “I have called this mental defect the Lucretius problem, after the Latin poetic philosopher who wrote that the fool believes that the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest one he has observed.” 

It is possible to expand from this observation and see why we are having a hard time engaging with many of our problems with the urgency they demand — such as our response to the climate crisis. 

Too often, when faced with an unprecedented storm or natural disaster, we assume it must be the worst possible scenario and then we move on. We forget that at the time those events were unprecedented. When Hurricane Juan came ashore in Nova Scotia in 2003 we had not experienced such a storm, but that did not guarantee a greater storm would not occur. 

We must acknowledge that our climate is changing and behaving in new and unpredictable ways. Past events are no longer a reliable data set from which to predict future events. The environmental conditions that are creating ever more intense forest fires, droughts and floods are a result of fundamental changes within our climate, thus increasing its unpredictability.

This was recently brought home to me when I was speaking with a neighbour in Lunenburg who lives next to Victoria street. Along with other nearby houses, they have been struggling with persistent flooding when we have heavy rains. Some residents have had to place insurance claims, and now their insures are saying that the homes are going to be uninsurable and may have to be demolished. It is hard to plan for the future, to care for one’s family, when you don’t know if your home is your primary financial asset or a liability. 

The climate crisis demands that we challenge our assumptions and change our behaviour. As Albert Einstein said,

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

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