Ecocriticism and Change: How Humans, Nature, and Change Interact

It's a rather obvious fact that humans are affected by the natural world. Changes with regards to the natural world, therefore, are of critical importance to people. These changes can range from earthquakes to new discoveries of fuels to the topic of tonight's post, climate change. All of these changes are met with varied reactions from people that reflect their view of humans' relationship with the natural world.

As I said before, tonight's post is about climate change. Over the past several decades, a considerable store of data has indicated that the Earth's climate is changing, with the trend indicating an increase in the average temperature of the Earth as well as significant increases in extreme weather patterns, including tropical storms/hurricanes and the recent polar vortex that the Chicago area went through earlier this year.

As with all the other topics we've examined this year, the climate change debate raises some interesting reactions. This is a situation in which something that affects everyone -- the Earth's climate -- is changing in many different ways, and humans have been given time to react to that change.

Some of those people have chosen to become environmentalists. These groups are the kinds that are, for example, opposing the Keystone XL Pipeline and advocating for lower carbon dioxide emissions so that the human impact on the climate is minimized, thereby protecting nature and the Earth. Not all of these people are very vocal, but there are vocal elements to this group, particularly in the form of organizations such as the Sierra Club, the National Resources Defense Council, and other environmental groups. These groups tend to be the public face of the environmentalists.

By contrast, there are others that argue that humans do not need to worry about climate change very much, with some going so far as to deny that climate change even exists. This group includes those who say that the human impact is not yet fully clear or those that say that the human impact is negligible. These people are often associated with being right-wing, and they oppose the environmental groups on many grounds. A major such ground is economic, saying that the economy would be adversely affected by some of the changes proposed by the environmentalists.

Though I have an opinion on this matter, the point of this post is not to explore that opinion. Rather, it is to examine a rather curious phenomenon: the views of humans' relation with nature results in certain views of climate change. Those who feel that the humans have an obligation and ability to change the way the Earth operates and have more faith in the ability of humans to affect nature argue for greater control, regulation, and environmentalism. On the other hand, those that say that the ability of humans to affect nature is very limited say that climate change is not a major human issue. This is a very interesting and timely example of a difference in ecocritical lenses resulting in different reactions to a change.

Economics and Change Part Two

In the previous post, I alluded to the financial crisis of 2008, which turned a recession into an economic nightmare and plunged the United States and world economies into a deep recession, the deepest since the Great Depression. A little while back, I read a book on the topic that lends itself very nicely to the subject of this blog. That book was The Big Short, by Michael Lewis.

The Big Short discussed the build-up to the financial crisis and the collapse of the housing bubble, following the story of the people who saw the storm coming and acted to profit from it. In essence, they created the market for credit default swaps on collateralized debt obligations. Essentially, these collateralized debt obligations were debts owed with collateral behind them, which, in this case, were largely mortgage-backed securities. These CDOs would be divided into several levels, or tranches, which would bear varying levels of risk of loss in the event of some of the loans on the CDOs defaulting, and to compensate for the varying levels of default risk, varying interest rates, with riskier tranches being given higher interest rates.

The biggest problem with this was that, due to the easy-credit bubble of this time, many of the loans and mortgages that these CDOs were based on were subprime. They had been given to people who had no or low-paying jobs, few to no other sources of incomes, and no ability to repay. Many of these loans were destined to default. This would have been bad enough, except the rating agencies were essentially deluded into thinking that these loans given to people who could not repay them were safe and not very risky, especially when packaged together. To paraphrase the book, it was as if the rating agencies believed that if a big enough pile of garbage was collected together and wrapped up nicely, it would turn into a pile of gold.

And so, the banks refused to believe that the dynamic of the rating agencies had changed, even in the face of logic. Despite being the ones to put pressure on the rating agencies to give the CDOs higher ratings than they were actually worth, the financial system largely refused to understand the new and changing paradigm and essentially believed their own lies. They put their faith in these ratings, and so, they started betting on these CDOs as a way to make money. 

The story in the The Big Short was one, however, of some people being able to recognize the changing paradigm. They were able to see the bad loans for what they were and bet against them in time to make a killing by establishing a market for credit default swaps -- essentially a bet against the CDOs, where a premium was paid as insurance against a default of the CDO. Because the CDOs were presumed safe, the premiums were very low, meaning that very large quantities of "insurance" could be taken out for very little.

These few people, who saw the changing paradigm in time to act, reacted in the most rational and most beneficial way (at least, to themselves). In refusing to go along with the standard ratings-can-be-taken-to-the-bank (pun absolutely intended) concept and in seeing the change in the rating agencies that helped form such a shaky foundation to the financial system, these people were able to make a boatload of money. Those who chose to act irrationally, get sucked in by their own game, and believe that the rating agencies that they had worked so hard to delude were making good calls ended up getting destroyed in the market and helping cause the financial crisis once the first parts of the recession hit and started causing defaults. Once again, irrationality and resistance to change resulted in chaos.