Revolution, fast and slow
The Sapiens Project was born out of research I conducted in Japan in 2020 and part of 2021. I was there to study how local governments are responding to population decline, and what I learned led me to larger questions about demographic change, climate change, the intersections between them, and why discussion about these is so limited.
Today is a holiday, so in the spirit of declaring my independence from a screen, I’ll keep this short. A while back, I was listening to political philosopher Yascha Mounk interview historian Niall Ferguson on Mounk’s podcast, “The Good Fight.” I could have sworn that Ferguson (born in Scotland and educated in the UK) dropped a pithy line about Americans loving revolution, because theirs turned out so well. The point resounded in my mind today, and I set out to re-listen to the episode. While this exact quote was sadly absent, I did find something similar in a piece Ferguson wrote for Newsweek back in 2011, in which he said “Americans love a revolution. Their own great nation having been founded by a revolutionary declaration and forged by a revolutionary war, they instinctively side with revolutionaries in other lands, no matter how different their circumstances, no matter how disastrous the outcomes.”
Revolutions can be fast or slow. They might take several years to unfold, like the American Revolution, or decades or even centuries in the case of climate change. We humans do a poor job tracking slow-moving threats, or even slow-moving change. Yet what we don’t track can and will hurt us. That’s the premise of the Sapiens Project: that we need to get real about climate change and how it will impact us at both the community and individual levels.