Hi, new to HIP and like to introduce myself. Older guy who lived through the Civil Rights movement, Kennedys assassinations, MLK assassination, Vietnam, Cuban missile crisis, Watergate etc. Throughout this entire time there were folks talking about the environment and our effect on the planet we live on. And the environmental cause has always taken a backseat in politics, in activism and every other part of life. This neglect is leading us to a world my kids, grandkids and great grandkids will struggle in. My generation and all the previous generations and the current generations have failed to take things as seriously as they are. We need only look at the daily news to see a planet that is dying at the hands of the humans living on it. I know it all sounds preachy and gloomy but I worked as an activist most of my adult life and was dismayed at the neglect given to the issue of climate change and environmental damage. Oh well ....maybe the younger generation like Greta can undo what we couldn't.
Welcome to HF......and all you say is true, a very sad legacy our generation has created and is leaving to the next generations. .And still the politicians and business are trying to pennypinch to make token improvements.......they don't want to take their snouts out of the trough and really lead.....it is really a crisis and pandemics are part of it! Simon :-(
people who don't like the environment should try living without one. the problem is our ego, both collective and too often individualy. its our whole cultural orientation in the dominant world, we've become isolated by familiarity from reality, and its not all technology that is bad, but how we choose and use it, and the priorities we base those choices upon. well nature has fired its shot across our bow with this pandemic thing, though of course only portions of the population recognize or understand these connections, or even what global warming actually is, and we have people opposing measure that would reduce population growth, which is the multiplier of everything else we're doing wrong. nature will restore its balance, even if it involved doing so by eliminating us, or coming close enough to it. people talk about doing what's needed and then have to compromise on half way measures to get anything done. most people are beginning to realize something needs to be done, but don't or refuse to see the connection with how they want to remain familiar with doing things. which brings us to an ecopocalypse of some kind, roll of the dice at this point for our species, and then people take that as an excuse its too late to do anything, which of course it isn't, so why try. but of course, well, there are many ways to reduce the human birthrate, and provide what infrastructure is really necessary without wanton disregard for what our very existence depends upon. its interesting to see as time goes on the efforts that do take place. as pointed out, none of this is new news, emerson and therough saw it comming and rachel carlson layed it on the line. we've seen the same bits of the world go by. when i was little you didn't have to be rich to live where you could go for a long walk in the woods just by walking out your door. and a half mile walk to a little town of less then a thousand people for groceries and hardware. what i mean by that is the population has increased by that much, and really seriously if there's one thing we need, its to drastically lower the human birth rate. unless and until we can do that, everything else will have limited effect.
There is enough food, space and resources for the world's current population and more, but not if the wealthy (mostly western world) wish to carry on living in the same style we are, utilising and wasting all the world's resources. "The wealthiest 32m people own more than the poorest 4.3bn put together The idea of the world's wealthy 1% is still a powerful one – and graphics like the pyramid below demonstrate that stark contrast between the few and the many 32m individuals (just 0.7% of the world's population) together hold US$98.7tn (or £62,000,0000,000,000, which represents 41% of global wealth). At the other extreme, there are 3.2bn individuals at the bottom of the pyramid. Together they have 3% of global riches, despite representing 68.7% of the world population." I believe it is a need for the privileged in this world to re-assess their lifestyle such that an equitable distribution of resources is achieved. And it is a proven fact that a higher standard of living reduces birth rates in poorer countries. Such a change would also begin to address some of the climate change problems that in most cases the wealthy world has caused! Simon
while the world as it stands could feed many more if we lived more honestly logically, that isn't the problem, the problem, among other things of course, is our crowding out of habitate for species diversity. not by direct habitation of our selves of course, sure there's way more space between where we cluster up the the spaces that occupies, however, the way we do infrastructure and the way we recreate, and even some of our extractive industries, do rob the natural world of things like migration paths and environmental diversity that species diversity depends upon. the carbon factor too, is solvable by more complete conversion to collecting and storing incident energy then continued reliance on conversion energy. but whatever we do or don't, population remains the principle multiplier of the delatorious effects of each thing we're doing wrong. and of course the carbon factor, what we've already created of it, will, however slowly and incrimentally, raise sea levels. it will create longer growing seasons, but less airable land to grow on. with salt wanter invasion into aquafers becoming a major factor in lowering food production, and of course warming itself, as we have already seen, accelerates mutation of illness factors and their vectors. so just because, yes, in principal at least, we could produce enough to feed more of us, does not mean nature will allow us, the reality of how the universe works, allow us, to continue to get away with wanton indifference to the effects, the broad and diverse spectrum of effects, of poorly though out, however traditional they might otherwise be, of doing so many of the things we have gotten away with how we've done them for a few hundred years, which is only a moment of time, on the scale, even of the life of our own species, which is a tiny fraction of the history of life on our planet, and that a likewise minute fraction of the history of its mineral substrate.
