Hemingway described in his book The Sun Also Rises published in 1926, three years before the Great Depression, how people go bankrupt, “Gradually, then suddenly”.
Does it make you think about anything else?
When I read about the economic application of this quote, which has been first coined by Rudiger Dornbusch, “the crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happened much faster that you would have thought”, I thought about environmental issues today. We still have to decide in which part of the quote we are currently living, is the crisis still slowly developing or are we in the process of enduring a great and rapid change in our environment.
There is a common phenomenon that often occurs in our houses and that illustrates perfectly this quote. Imagine you are reading a book in your house, everything is calm, no one is in the house, you are just reading on the sofa the great The Sun Also Rises. Suddenly, an old book that you have not touched for ages fall from the top of your bookshelf, taking you by surprise. When it happened to me, the only reasonable explanation that I found was that, the book must have been sliding down really slowly, until it fell causing surprise and a small distress.
That it is exactly what is currently happening with the environment, our attitudes toward the environment is slowly taking us down a route leading to a catastrophe.
The second interesting point made by this quote, is the question of perception. The Human mind is not rational and understands and perceives things according to a certain narrative. This narrative is influenced by different sources of power such as the media, governments, social movements etc… If we are not actively working on changing the narrative that states that the environmental crisis is still far away, we are going straight into the wall.
The most important point made by this quote maybe, is that it underlines the necessity to generate change before the crisis reaches the point of no return, the moment the crisis “happens much faster than you would have thought”.
To make sure we generate change and future generation perpetuate this change, education is needed that is why we provide courses to connect with Nature.