One of the rea­sons the gen­eral pub­lic are slow in act­ing on cli­mate change in the man­ner the situation’s impor­tance demands is our reluc­tance to think too far beyond our imme­di­ate time hori­zon. How­ever this shouldn’t stop us.

That is the sug­ges­tion of Mar­tin Rees, Astronomer Royal, who extols the virtues of long-term think­ing more elo­quently than I’ve heard before:

“As in pol­i­tics,” he says, “the imme­di­ate trumps the impor­tant.” Our future-blindness may reflect a basic lim­i­ta­tion of the brain. “In so far as brains evolved to cope with every­day life on the savan­nah, they evolved in a con­text where you didn’t plan 50 years ahead and you cared about your local com­mu­nity. Although…” A pause. A sip of tea. “Although, it’s odd—I gave a talk at Ely cathe­dral not long ago. The peo­ple who built the cathe­dral had a lim­ited view of the world. Their world was the fens, and they thought it would end quite soon, but nev­er­the­less built this won­der­ful struc­ture which is part of our her­itage 1,000 years later. And it’s shame­ful in a way that we, with our longer hori­zons and greater resources, are reluc­tant to think 50 years ahead.”

via The Browser

Note: The full arti­cle is behind a pay wall. The above quote and the con­text thereof is available.