431–440 of 454 posts
There's a saying, "You don't have a bug problem, you have a lack of (insert appropriate bug predator here) problem."
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So start doing something. What have you got to lose if you're already doomed? Get yourself a copy of Deep Green resistance and join an aboveground affiliate group. It's easy to manufacture excuses not to do something because it looks impossible. So what? Better than saying you sat there and did nothing and watched it all disintegrate.
Cutting down our per head footprint is nice and laudable, but it's really just a minor tweak to the "O" in an exponential "Big Oh". I suspect that crispinb deems something much more paradigmatic necessary than just a bit of reprorization in economic policies and everybody using less plastic bags. Some paradigm shifts are so big that it is very difficult to even think about them loudly without getting universally shun…
> individualistic basic human rights will have to occasionally take a second place?
One could argue that this is the case right now. That the lack of protection of individual human rights is what got us into this mess. It wasn't individuals in communities that asked for their lands to be taken by a wealthy few or by corporations, to be used for generating profit through environmental destruction. Many people actively struggled against the acquisition and destruction of local ecological habitats. They were a majority opposing a small few powerful people or businesses. But the "individual rights" of those few were valued more and now the many must suffer the consequences...
Being an earth dwelling human, this seems pretty bad. Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do? Is there an organization that is trying to rid the world of pesticides (assuming that's the cause)? If I opt to call my representatives, what am I calling in support of/against? Over the last year, reading the news had made me more passive and worried. I want to dedicate a slice…
Being an earth dwelling human, this seems pretty bad. Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do? Is there an organization that is trying to rid the world of pesticides (assuming that's the cause)? If I opt to call my representatives, what am I calling in support of/against? Over the last year, reading the news had made me more passive and worried. I want to dedicate a slice…
https://deepgreenresistance.org/en/ Find or form a group in your area, consider dumping or downgrading your existing career which may well be meaningless anyway, and take up activism. At least you won't be subject to suffocating feelings of futility and guilt. Start tomorrow, it'll take you a year or two of work to figure out your new job so you'd better get busy with it.
I'd recommend reading earth first! or black and green press for some better politics on a similar wavelength
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> I want to dedicate a slice of time to doing something to solve the problem Eat less meat (huge environmental impact!), bike more, don't consume as much non-local food, etc.
> don't consume as much non-local food This is actually an unscientific myth. It's counterintuitive but it can be much better for the environment to eat non-local food: http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2015/06/the_biggest_myt...
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I wanted to tack on here that even our agriculture has a huge environmental impact — nothing worse for biodiversity than how we’ve replaced animal habitats with fields of a single crop! And then pesticides etc. I don’t know if it ever happen, but we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game. Properly Managed Captured Fisheries (Mostly more prosperous nations have well managed fisheries, o…
> we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game I guess if you HAVE to eat meat that is a better option, but we don't need it anymore. Its such an inefficient way to get calories and its not as nutritious as plant substitutes.
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>use pesticides to get rid of disease-carrying ticks Unfortunately this solution is a bit like using a nuclear bomb to get rid of gang violence. It does indeed do that, but at the expense of destroying the entire beneficial insect community as well. Generally pest species recover faster after catastrophe than beneficial species, so by eliminating all of the pest's competitors pesticides are sewing the seeds of future…
By your response it looks like you assumed I thought using pesticides were a good idea. I only said I understood why people might choose to. It wasn't an endorsement.
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I'd like to bet against civilization collapsing by January 1, 2020. Given how dire that scenario is, I see the problem ceejayoz pointed out where there might not be much value to money at that point. But maybe we can bet on a precursor, like a stock market crash. There are probably scenarios where the stock market crashes first, but there's still time to use money before civilizational collapse. I think we can solve…
Sounds reasonable to me :)
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> don't consume as much non-local food This is actually an unscientific myth. It's counterintuitive but it can be much better for the environment to eat non-local food: http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2015/06/the_biggest_myt...
That article is missing point. The point of eating local food is that you eat what's in season and what's available in your area. Obviously if you live in Canada you won't be able to find 'local' Avocados, but the idea is you would forfeit eating Avocados in favor of eating whatever is locally produced, instead of shipping those Avocados from Mexico.
What the article is asserting and what the science shows is that even if you have Avacados being grown literally next door the environmental impact of buying them locally is often higher than shipping them from abroad.
For example, the SGU podcast they link to [1] (around 55m:50s in) discusses that the net environmental impact (carbon emissions) of shipping beef to the UK from New Zealand is less than consuming UK beef in the UK. So if you're an environmentally conscious UK consumer you should be spending extra to buy NZ beef instead of buying locally produced beef.
This is because the carbon impact of the transportation generally hovers around 10%, which leaves the other 90% for actually producing the product "locally", and some locations on earth are vastly more efficient by every environmental metric in growing certain crops or raising certain livestock.
From the podcast: "An acre of land in Idaho can produce twice the amount of potatoes as an acre of land in Kansas".
Which leaves two reasons to buy locally.
Firstly you may be living in one of the places that's efficient at producing a given product, e.g. you'd buy local beef in New Zealand instead of importing it from the UK.
Secondly there are certain products that don't ship well, e.g. heirloom tomatoes. There you simply don't have the option of buying anything except local varieties.