It's cold so I don't care...

A friend of ours brought up an idea in class today that I thought we could explore it further. His notion was Canada's climate has a direct impact on the level of thinking and care Canadians put towards important issues, particularly those of the environmental nature. Pretty interesting.

The underlying principle of this idea is that during the colder months many Canadians will effectively "shut down their brain" and stop caring about environmental issues, primarily because they're too busy thinking about other things, like staying warm, paying the higher winter bills and whatever else people do in the winter.

I think there's something to this idea. The colder months offer several barriers. First of all, it's cold. There's less desire to go outside and more to stay huddled up inside. Your psyche will get hit as a result of this, as you probably have less contact with people and your general level of contentment probably takes a hit. After growing up in Winnipeg, nothing is more calming on the mind than the exit of those atrociously cold days. Your productivity might also fall, as you become less energetic and willing to do things.

This fall in productivity can have two broad effects: 1) You don't have enough desire to put what energy you do have into caring about and exploring environmental issues. 2) You may want to put your energy into considering environmental issues, but your overall decrease in productivity may lead to a detriment of your financial productivity (say, at work), so to counteract that fall, a greater proportion of your energy may go towards focusing on that bottom line so you can maintain that same financial productivity throughout the year.

Lastly, the cold months are more expensive: Heating bills, car maintenance, the increased length to get from A to B and even those wonderfully pesky consumerism-driven holidays. When your mind is focused on your own finances it can be very difficult to consider other issues. You'll put more time into concentrating on those factors, which will take away from your time to think about the ol' Spotted Owl.

So during the winter months, those bigwigs who are a little less environmentally-focused as some others (such as a large, evil multinational) may decide that it is a better time to push their agendas since less people will be opposed.

This theory is fraught with broad generalizations of people's behaviour, but I think there may be something to the general idea. Whether or not the big corps are actually playing according to this theory might be a stretch, but it's possible. We'll see what the conspiracy theorists think about it.

One question I have is why other countries with our climate don't suffer as well? Scandinavia is at the other end of the spectrum with regards to environmental issues, so there are obviously some flaws to the idea, but I'm curious to know what people think.

Let us know.