“Bringing the environmental crisis back to our brains is disguising political ideology as popular science”

by time news

Lhe environmental crisis? It would be because of our brain. Not our fault, no. That of the tangle of neurons that we have between the ears. Climate change, the destruction and overexploitation of the oceans, the industrialization of agriculture and livestock, the collapse of common biodiversity, the destruction of natural habitats, the proliferation of plastic: all of this would be determined by our deep brain structures. Thanks to a few books published recently, this little music rocks public conversation these days.

The culprit would be the striatum, nestled under the cortex, shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to make our brains sparkle with pleasure at each behavior likely to guarantee the survival and that of the species: eating, copulating, s rise in the social hierarchy, glean new and surprising information… All of this without limit, to the point of excess. Until the destruction of the biosphere and the climate. Man would thus be programmed to behave like an invasive species, to be in short, vis-à-vis his environment, little more than a parasite in the framework.

It is undeniable that, in recent years, work carried out in cognitive psychology and neuroscience has made it possible to explore – to a certain extent – ​​the cerebral sources of individual choices (although the scope and interpretation of some of these results are hotly debated). But to make these mechanisms a dominant cause of the destiny of societies simply amounts to denying almost all the knowledge accumulated by the human and social sciences.

Who is then “responsible”?

The destruction of the environment does not result from a sum of individual decisions and trade-offs on the time we will spend in the shower, on the quantity of meat we will eat during the week or on the number of air travel that we allow ourselves during the year. It is above all a matter of political choices that contribute to building and making economic and social structures work, and has little to do with the influx of dopamine into the brains of individuals.

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It is of course likely that the economic system we have built takes advantage of our brain function to generate ever more growth and ever faster destroy the environment, but who is then “responsible”: individuals (equipped with their brains) , or rather the political choices that induce the functioning of the economy?

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