We are getting so used to things like pollution and the turbulent changes in the climate, that we have begun to perceive these as normal. That is scary since it dents our will to act against harmful changes. 

As for the climate, each generation is inheriting a warmer, more degraded environment, so yesterday’s extremes are quietly becoming today’s normal. This “shifting baseline” is one of the more dangerous dimensions of climate change because it is invoking a reaction from the brain. When ecological loss becomes normalised, our ability to recognise the crisis, and demand action, diminishes with it.

I recently came across this insightful article from McGill University that examines why climate change is failing to generate the urgency it demands. The article posits that our brains are poorly equipped to process a threat that is gradual, dispersed and not immediately visible. Our brains are conditioned to focus on an immediate threat not so much on a situation that is worsening gradually and that does not appear immediately threatening. Each generation is only experiencing a somewhat worse, somewhat more damaging degradation of the environment or the biosphere, no generation actually sees the complete degradation or the total loss. So it does not jump up to intervene, and the damage continues.

Link to the article https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/environment/how-do-you-squeeze-climate-change-inside-human-brain