This week’s selected media, March 16, 2025: Judgment at Nuremberg, Venomous Lumpsucker
This week I finished:
Judgment at Nuremberg, directed by Stanley Kramer: A friend recommended this movie, I think because I’ve been talking about how there aren’t in our environmental situation the “bad guys” everyone thinks. There aren’t “good guys” either.
We’re in a system that nobody deliberately created. My book traces the origins of how our system started from people doing things nobody could have expected to lead here. We today continue acting what seems right. The results seem more clear, which you might say should make our choices more obvious, but the inertia to keep doing what we’re doing is greater.
This movie represents the trials of people who followed the Nazi party to various levels of complicity or support. The context of judging them includes the views of everyone: Germans who complied, Americans who look to the cold war coming and want present-day German support, legal precedent, victims, history, and more.
There are no answers everyone would agree are right, yet it seems we need government to resolve conflicts. What seems right looking back wasn’t so obvious then.
We face similar dilemmas today. What seems right, in my opinion, from the viewpoint of future generations, doesn’t seem so obvious to people today who keep polluting and depleting.
The movie took on representing difficult situations. I thought it treated the multiple views and no answers everyone would agree on effectively. We can learn from Nuremberg and the choices people made while Hitler was rising to power, before concentration camps existed, when they did but people could plausibly deny knowing, when they must have known, and so on.
Is it scary to see how complicit people could become while claiming ignorance? How right people today can feel, even ardent environmentalists, doing things that hurt people? How much people who claim to believe in liberty and freedom compromise these values for a lifestyle they claim require sacrificing them?
Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman: Having a background in science leads people to recommend things related to science or science fiction. Likewise with sustainability.
This book is science fiction about sustainability, so someone recommended it to me. I’ve never understood the appeal of science fiction since it rarely appeals to me. (When people recommend science and science fiction to me, or to meet their other friend with a science background, it feels like when they meet someone with a skin color or sexual preference and want to introduce them to their other friends with that skin color or sexual preference. Just because I studied science doesn’t mean I like everyone else who did too. You just lump us together in your mind.)
This book is more than just science fiction. It’s dark humor and satire of our culture’s self-serving, fatuous, ineffective-by-design performative attempts at sustainability. Beauman thought about many relevant issues about people, wildlife, and our systems. He lays them bare for us to see how cockamamie we’ve made them.
Because of its wealth of detail and Beauman’s thoughtful representation of many sustainability issues, I found the book engaging, but it still leaves me confused. Beauman researched all these problems. He’s more aware of them than most. I think he sees suffering coming. Why doesn’t he act to avert the problems? Why only satirize and comment on them when we need to do so much to avert catastrophe?
Why don’t people who understand our environmental situation lead us out of it, or at least try? Writing a book isn’t leading. Nearly no one else is trying either, so I don’t single this author out, but why does almost no one try.
I’m partly asking because I know the answer, which I cover in my book Sustainability Simplified, and will explore more in future books. I’ll share where I broach this topic in the beginning of my book:
“The vast majority of US companies are asleep at the wheel when it comes to tackling climate change,” reported The Guardian a decade ago.1 Last year The Hill reported, “DC is asleep at the wheel when it comes to climate.”2 Everyone seems to think someone else is at the wheel, just not acting: scientists, educators, journalists, activists, and businesspeople act as if: “If I do my part, it will help wake up the people asleep at the wheel. Then they’ll act.”
Yet no one is steering. Many talk big about sustainability and do things that signal they’re acting sustainable like buying carbon offsets, inadvertently exacerbating the problems they want to solve. Nearly all indicators of our environmental problems continue unabated—deforestation, ocean plastic, greenhouse emissions, extinctions, etc. Environmental catastrophes are compounding, any one of which seems too hard to solve. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. As different as they appear, they all result from our behavior, which results from our stories, role models, images, beliefs, and what make up our culture. If we don’t change our culture, we can fix problem after problem but we’ll end up back here.
No profession is designed to develop the skills and experience necessary to change our culture—not science, education, activism, politics, engineering, business, or any of the loudest voices. If everyone only does what they’re skilled at, everyone will feel they’re doing their part and we will never change course.
No one is asleep at the wheel. No one is at the wheel. If only there were someone in charge to take responsibility. It would help if a position existed whose role was to fix the environment. It doesn’t exist. If we all do our parts, we won’t change course, no matter how much we protest, write, vote, donate, innovate technology, tax carbon, or buy more things marketed as “green” or “renewable.” Many of those actions will cause us to accelerate the system causing our environmental problems, as we’ll see. The sources of our culture—including Washington, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and academia—propose solutions that, however well-intentioned, accelerate the results of our culture yet more, including its environmental damage. It’s like in the horror movie when we learn the call is coming from inside the house.
Why Has No One Led So Far?
Why is no one at the wheel? Many people spread facts, numbers, and instruction, but not leading in the field of sustainability. By lead, I mean: to help people do what they already wanted to but haven’t figured out how. Why is no one leading in sustainability?
1 Jo Confino, “Best Practices in Sustainability: Ford, Starbucks and More,” The Guardian, April 30, 2014.
2 Louis Geltman and Shoren Brown, “DC is Asleep at the Wheel When It Comes to Climate,” The Hill, March 14, 2022.
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