Frivolously, I mused that God may have created trees because, looking ahead, He knew Australians would need shade to sit in while attending outdoor summertime productions of Shakespeare’s plays. Matters of heat and shade and trees should be on the minds of all thinking Canberrans, all Australians, at the moment. The debate on Canberra’s alarmingly thinning tree cover (letting in glaring heat that with global warming is now becoming more infernal) continues apace. Then on Monday, our prime minister, moved, glacially, to announce some climate-addressing policies. His initiatives (for example something that used to be called The Emissions Reduction Fund is now to be called, more stirringly, The Climate Solutions Fund) have been greeted with widespread disappointment as being too token. In their feebleness they’re proof, planet-anxious critics seethe, that the government (which has under-evolved climate change deniers like Tony “climate change is crap” Abbott in its ranks) simply doesn’t get the immediacy of our dear planet’s plight. Yes, if the government has had a sincere climate epiphany then I am Oliver Mellors the gamekeeper, Lady Chatterley’s lover. And yet, as exasperated as so many of us are by governments’ snail-like slowness in addressing climate global heating, it may be that this is the fault not only of governments but of we, the people, indeed of us the species.

In a new piece, Why We Stink At Tackling Climate Change (read it in the online science magazine Nautilus), David P. Barash asks, “What’s wrong with us … with our species, Homo sapiens? If human beings are as Hamlet suggested, ‘noble in reason, infinite in faculty,’ then why are we facing so many problems?” “In many ways, people are better off than ever before … and yet global threats abound and are getting worse. [They include] above all the disaster of global climate change. “From my biological perspective [what’s wrong] is the deep-seated disconnect between our slow-moving, inexorable biological evolution and its fast-moving cultural counterpart - and the troublesome fact we are subject to both, simultaneously. “Biological evolution is an organic process that can never proceed more rapidly than one generation at a time … By contrast, cultural evolution is extraordinary in its speed [and endows us with wondrous skills] but the ability to employ these skills to master our immediate environment almost certainly outran our biological evolution. “Our biology-culture disconnect’s imprint can be seen in nearly every big-picture problem we currently face. Enter global heating.

“Insofar as the combustion of fossil fuels generates millions of tons of carbon dioxide [exacerbating the greenhouse effect] this phenomenon is largely due to the industrial revolution, barely more than two centuries old, during which time our biological evolution has essentially remained unchanged. “[So] rapid cultural evolution has bequeathed us the physical and chemical half of the problem. At the same time, slow moving biological evolution has left us both reluctant to acknowledge the problem and - even when that psychological roadblock is surmounted - often disinclined to do very much about it. Why? “Go back to our savannah-dwelling ancestors. Although some regular environmental variations were doubtless recognised [most] changes would have been so gradual as to be almost imperceptible … Our biologically evolved selves are quite good at perceiving events that are prompt and threatening but no good at perceiving those [like global heating] that are slow-moving, although equally threatening.” Thinking readers, can you see yourselves, your savannah sides, in this analysis? Do you find yourself still living your life as if you can’t fully grasp that your grandchildren are destined, unless we do something, to have to live on an increasingly uninhabitable planet? Do you, culturally evolved, read and somehow believe the dire climate science yet still catch your biologically under-evolved self still doing planet-unfriendly things? I know I do. Why, this very week your columnist took delight in planning and booking an elaborate overseas excursion (China! Japan! The Orient, here I come!) and only afterwards remembered global heating and felt a pang of distress at the thought of the especially noxious greenhouse gases my numerous flights will emit. Do I love my sweet, fragile planet enough, fear for its long-term health enough, to give up flying in aeroplanes in search of fleeting foreign pleasures? Apparently not.

Under the trees at Glebe Park, dwelling on David Barash’s analysis, I marvelled at how we get on with our everyday lives of picnics and plays while our planet’s catastrophe slowly looms. Is it that biologically underevolved, we fancy, like underevolved-in-every-way Tony Abbott, that “climate change is crap” and so nothing to worry about? What is to become of us, Homo underevolvus, in our blissful lack of urgency?