Foreshortened perspective keeps people blind to irreversible environmental collapse

Evidence

A foreshortened perspective in a disastrous ecological course calls to mind the apocryphal story that Donald Collins (2007) tells about the person who jumps off the Empire State Building. As he passes the 68th floor, he thinks to himself, “So far, so good.” Rachel Carson dedicated Silent Spring (1962) to Albert Schweitzer and quoted the alarm he sounded over the grave consequences of an unremitting foreshortened perspective: “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2549

Categorization

• CANDY: The Empire State Building ‘So far, so good’ anecdote is a perfect, quotable encapsulation of climate denial.
• SEED: The metaphor of the suicidal jumper’s foreshortened perspective maps directly onto how short-term reward structures blind institutions to long-horizon collapse — an essay angle on how foresight scales with payoff horizon.
• XREF: connects to: Humans are blind to their own lack of an original fixed nature