The biggest barrier to us acting on climate change on an individual level is not awareness, but our values and priorities. A study from 2005 concluded that although 92% of Americans is aware the issue, yet in the 14 years since we have barely moved the needle significantly neither politically nor culturally. Many well-meaning groups try to make awareness and outreach their goal to tackle climate change, which unfortunately does not address the core underlying issue.

Freedom is a concept onto which we project our own desires, creating individualised projections of what freedom should be. There’s a level of consensus but also one of subjectivity and as this intersubjectivity moves and shifts over time it creates new frictions on the dialogue of freedom vs control. Gun rights went from necessary to widely revoked. Marriage equality went from unthinkable to increasingly accepted.

As humans we naturally tend to categorize and compartmentalize. Political left vs right. Male vs female. Race A vs race B. The danger arises when people exert pressures to coerse those that do not conform completely in one group or another. The result is a disturbing lack of middle ground in a culture full of false binaries where individuals lying outside of these poles are often marginalised, ridiculed, or worse are faced with violence.

The following is a visualization of this polarization.