Over the past few decades a recurring question arises in public ecological discourse: In the face of overwhelming evidence, scientific warnings, existential urgency, and countless examples of ecological disintegration, why are societies worldwide so slow to respond appropriately?

Why, fifty years after the Limits to Growth study, are we still not able to slow human expansion and consumption? Why, fifty years after the UN first raised the issue of human population stress, are we still quibbling about whether or not we should even discuss the delicate issue? Why — 80 years after Alice Hamilton’s Exploring The Dangerous Trades, and 60 years after Rachel Carson’s, Silent Spring — are we still flooding our environments and our bodies with toxins? Why — after 33 international climate meetings over 41 years, two centuries since science understood the greenhouse effect — are human carbon emissions still rising? 

As a species, and as diverse societies, we’re acting like an immature student, who keeps avoiding a simple homework assignment. Except this is not an individual failure, but rather a vast, collective failure. 

We can understand that large, complex systems, such as interacting societies of billions of people, are more complex than an individual, and that complexity certainly provides part of the answer to our question about humanity’s slow pace of change. However, there appear to be some built-in qualities of society that prevent us from changing our habits quickly. We often hear this called “social inertia,” an inherent resistance to change. 

So what can we do?

Ecologists may understandably feel the weight of these realities, but there is no time for despair. We have to get on with the challenge of turning toward a genuinely ecological society. 

Social activism has long been the friction that slows and redirects societies’ inertia, whether that inertia maintains a failure of human rights, international peace, social justice, or ecology.