Econundrum
Does the global threat of climate change make us ambivalent to more local environmental problems?
“In ‘Annie Hall,’ when the young Alvy Singer stopped doing his homework, his mother took him to a psychiatrist. It turned out that Alvy had read that the universe is expanding, which would surely lead to its breaking apart some day, and to him this was an argument for not doing his homework: ‘What’s the point?’ Under the shadow of vast global problems and vast global remedies, smaller-scale actions on behalf of nature can seem similarly meaningless. But Alvy’s mother was having none of it. ‘You’re here in Brooklyn!’ she said. ‘Brooklyn is not expanding!’ It all depends on what we mean by meaning.”
—From “Carbon Capture,” Jonathan Franzen's New Yorker piece on how the looming prospect of climate change can obscure present-day threats
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