“I think what you’re talking about is actually getting more to a gap in our ability to think beyond ourselves and our particular desires or interests, which is exactly why we’re in this environmental crisis in the first place.” Thill tells me over the phone from California. “We can’t think historically, we can’t think deep time, because we can’t think beyond our own selves or our own lives or our own interests or obsessions. [Products like Pops!] wouldn’t be even able to exist, you wouldn’t be able to market and commodify this stuff and hoodwink people into spending all their money on it if you hadn’t somehow created a culture where all of those questions you’re asking just don’t ever get asked.”
Thill compares it to our global inability to deal with nuclear waste, a subject he covers in his book. “[It’s less surprising] when the smartest scientific minds in the world don’t know what the hell to do with our own nuclear waste we created. If we can’t even solve that kind of problem, how do you begin to solve the problem of people thinking this is a good use of their time and effort to enrich Walmart and the Disney Company just so they can have a cool object on their shelf?” {read}