The power of listening

It is disappointing to reflect on the fact that many of the problems the world is going through now could have been avoided had people been listened to. 

People - including me, but others as well - have been urging action to address health risks with air conditioning since - in my case - the 1980s, but it was dismissed as being too expensive. Of course, the blind dinosaurs at that time were obviously not counting all the sick days that came from flu every year, and now that we have an airborne pandemic, I get the sense that those same groups of people are trying to avoid admitting they were wrong with a whole swath of excuses. 

Similarly, many people have been warning of the climate crises for decades - back into the 1800s, in some cases. Again, the dollar and profit was paramount, and people were viewed as expendable economic cogs, and now not only the economic system but our very survival is at risk. 

In my case, I've been arguing with architects over the need for things like eaves or verandahs to protect the walls of "modern"  (the old Queenslander style was better and, I would argue, more "modern") Australian houses from heat waves since the 1980s - with ****head responses that are effectively along the lines of "we can burn as much coal to generate power to run avoidable or minimisable air conditioning to cool houses that have been overheating because of architecture's sick obsession with no eaves or verandahs". 

And now the airline industry, which has been treating people like cattle, is being forced to address the complaints of its human cattle made since the90s because of the pandemic. Where would we be if those complaints had been treated with respect (which includes accepting their validity, and that they have at least equal weight with profit) in terms of minimising the spread and impact of the pandemic?