Abstrakt
Sir David Attenborough opens his documentary Life on Our Planet in Chernobyl, in the place of the nuclear disaster that occurred in 1986. His message is that nature can regenerate, and he aims to encourage people to protect the environment and avert the clime crisis.
Chernobyl disaster has undeniably a symbolic value. For Sir Attenborough, it illustrates recreative powers of nature, for me - as I aim to show - a disproportion in human perception.
On the one hand, people are terrified and shocked when facing natural catastrophes (earthquakes, fires, and nuclear disasters in particular). On the other hand, they (or a significant part) seem intact face a global climate crisis.
In my presentation, I intend to explain why it might be so. I will base this explanation on Arthur C.
Danto's philosophy of history. Danto - mostly known as a philosopher of art - introduced his thesis that a meaning of a particular (historical) event is not accessible for its contemporaries since they cannot connect it with subsequent happenings in his Analytical Philosophy of History.
Our historical knowledge is thus retrospective in character in that the meaning of it changes concerning future events. Consequently, we can distinguish between two modes of knowledge: direct experience with a particular occurrence and historical (narrative) knowledge.
Of course, the climate crisis is not a historical event of the type as the battle of Jena. However, these two kinds of knowledge can explain why we feel emotionally moved by the earthquake but not necessarily by the prediction of global warming.
Although scientists were able to model the consequences of the deflation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the 1970 s (Rich, Losing Earth, 2019), politicians were unwilling to act because the damage was not visible. My point is that even if we identify global warming as a cause of - for example - fires in Australia, this identification is possible only due to narrative knowledge, i.e., in retrospect.
In contrast, fires themselves are the object of direct knowledge or perception, and therefore they seem to be more real. The same is with the Chernobyl disaster (Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, 2019).
Although the nuclear catastrophe gave rise to fewer victims than global warming caused by our carbon dioxide production, the meaning of climate crisis is accessible only through retrospective reading. The prediction of the 1970 s is a reality of our time: its meaning becomes visible.