Just 29k Western Monarch butterflies are left in California

We can dance around proximal causes all we want, but all environmental roads lead to overpopulation.

Most people associate acting on population with China forcing abortions or tearing down homes, or racist eugenics policies or forced sterilizations.

That's why when I talk about overpopulation, I talk about success cases like Thailand. Or how Mexico's soap operas helped lower that nation's birth rate. These cases brought prosperity, stability, and abundance.

When they say we need more people to create more minds to solve bigger problems, I point out the geniuses have already been born and they said the population was too high. Besides, what was the world population that produced Beethoven and Shakespeare. Einstein was born to a population below 2 billion. Buddha and Jesus lived below 1 billion.

The greatest technologies to solve our environmental problems aren't solar powered planes, thorium, and rocket ships. It's IUD, vasectomies, and other tools of family planning, along with educating everyone about it.

Have you stopped buying the myriad "cleaning" products which pollute your home and create pollution in the process of being produced?

Have you stopped buying disposable clothing and plastic trinkets?

If you are still buying these things, you are complicit in this ecocide. And now you know it, too.

Once you stop yourself, you can tell others, too.

Without making changes in your own actions, there's little you can ask of anyone else.

This is a change that will come one individual convincing another individual, one at a time, to stop contributing to the problem.

No one else will do it for us: politicians don't give a fuck, corporations don't give a fuck, regulators don't give a fuck, military doesn't give a fuck, even "scientists" are mostly in the same camp of not giving a fuck, for the most part.

We are the only ones who give a fuck, because it's our close relatives, and soon, us, who are being exterminated.

And we are feeding and building our own extermination machine.

> None of that is by any means an excuse to sit back and just take the ride.

At this point, there's inaction exactly because we don't want to acknowledge our own impermanence. The phrase "living like there's no tomorrow" means exactly that: denial.

Why do we hug fossil fuels so tight? We can't we imagine anything else but growth and consumerism? Why the "Do we have to go back to living in caves?" argument?

Where does that come from? It's because of the sheer terror of our own very individual impermanence, our own destruction into nothingness at the end of life.

That same drive for survival regardless of the costs, which has spawned us and our unique sense of awareness, is now turning against us. It causes us to seize up and cling onto ideas and behaviors that do us more harm then good.

Only when we're willing to accept that we're all just temporary travelers on that great current of Time, we'll be able to punch through deep rooted beliefs and tropes that are holding us back.

Is that deep thought? Sure it is. Everything else, such as debating the accuracy of predictive climate models, is more or less the minutiae.

At the end of the day, science only carries meaning to humans. Those Western Monarch Butterflies won't care about the statistics anyhow. They just live and die. Unaware whether it was a asteroid or fossil fuel use that carried them to their end. End of story.

If they stopped single-use plastics, that would be a world first. Microbeads were recently banned; this is obviously orders of magnitude more effective than boycotting microbead-containing hygiene products would ever have been.

By all means, reduce your personal consumption of harmful products. Don't fool yourself into thinking it's a substitute for activism and political action.