Are qualifications necessary?
Is it not enough to adopt a way of life / attitude?
There is I suppose a spectrum of environmentalists … I’m somewhere in the middle having some qualifications and adopted some actions / lifestyle choices as @TimOopNorth suggests. But I don’t demonstrate…
2 Likes
Well to mother nature, we’re the virus and viruses are her anibodies.
In seriousness though, the envirnment has literally kept me up at night worrying. I feel like no matter what I do, I’m powerless because I can’t affect the other 7 billion people and what they do. C’mon people! Upgrading phones every 2 years and a new computer and TV not much less frequent. WTF are people thinking!? I worry about everything I buy and whether it really gets recycled. Then I worry that if it is recycled, is the recycling process better or worse for the environment? Then I worry about the 4 billion people in countries where caring about the environment is a luxury they can’t afford despite the wealthier half causing the problem. Then I worry about government initiatives to encourage the public to upgrade to green appliances that are really aimed at stimulating demanf and what happens to all the old stuff that was working? And in many cases wasn’t any less environmentally friendly, it just didn’t have a bloody sticker that looked like a green leaf on it.
Then the sun comes up and I’ve lost a night. I’d say this makes less environmentalist and just plain mentalist.
5 Likes
Even using this forum incurs use of energy hungry data centres.
2 Likes
I commit to picking up a couple of thrown plastic bottles or aluminium cans each dog walk.
It amazes me that often they are not empty.
I campaign with the local council to keep to their rubbish cleaning targets.
I could spend all day on the beach picking up muck and not make much difference.
I do note that there is not so much obvious commercial ship waste on the shore.
We do what we can.
N
4 Likes
I concur, I did a local litter pick today and found branded lager cans and carton dumped next to a bin, including one unopened? Much easier to pick empty ones.
1 Like
And that’s the point - you can either go ‘‘tut , tut’’ or you can do something about it.
Lost track of the rubbish I have brought back from walks, I no longer take a shopping bag- I know that usually I will pick one up. Though I must admit since Lockdown I think there has been less rubbish
1 Like
…and what there is I think we’re more reluctant to touch, just in case…
2 Likes
It’s hard to imagine a long future for the human race, or at least what passes for civilisation, in the environment we’re creating, I hope it’s just a lack of imagination.
We’ve been dodging a Malthusian crisis with technical fixes for some time now and we’re probably not quite done but there’s plenty to worry about.
Yeah. I wonder how many feel this way and whether there is a correlation between that feeling that we are numbered and morbid fascination with post apocalypse fiction.
Certainly the genre I find hard to put down and probably because I can’t imagine things going any other way. I worry constantly that my kids will live to see something truly cataclysmic like the end of modern civilisation. Half of my brain calls the other half a nutcase for believing it will happen. The other half thinks the same about the other for not believing it will happen.
But, according to the Soil Association. a field of grazing cows is better, net, for green house gasses than a field of crops.
Certainly a field of cows is better for the wild life. Our last house we had grazing fields all round us and there were loads of owls, birds, hedgehogs, &c. New house we have arable fields around us (actually bare earth at the moment) and there’s noticeably less. 
1 Like
I think the hidden problem there though is that cattle aren’t displacing arable farmland. So a 1:1 comparison probably isn’t that meaningful. They are displacing forests which would otherwise be storing CO2 and releasing oxygen.
Ultimately, there might be enough food to go around but the reality is distribution and waste and harping on about how people should waste less and distribute better to help our fellow man and the environment is an empty wish. We know full well that won’t happen. People will buy too much. Throw stuff out. Hog resources. Subsidise farming in rich countries to the extent the produce puts farmers in poor nations out of business etc.
The bottom line is, some of the variables in the population:resource equation aren’t really variable and cannot be made to work on anything but paper. We just have way too many people.
But mankind is also the only species that demonstrates Darwinism in reverse. Survival of the weakest. The wealthiest, most educated, most gifted with opportunity of the people on earth have the fewest children. The poorest, worst educated, with least opportunities have the most. We’ve build in our own demise.
4 Likes
Grass fed cattle are grazing land on which the native ecosystem is long gone. It’s a less extreme form of monoculture that some arable farming, but in the UK at least, the damage is already done and we are so far removed from self sufficiency that reforestation isn’t going to happen.
Where is becomes much worse is when cattle are fed on grain and other feeds, which are grown on arable land elsewhere, processed, transported and chucked in a feed trough.
1 Like
While true and i agree that human overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem, this shouldn’t obscure the fact that:
The wealthiest 1% of the world’s population were responsible for the emission of more than twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorer half of the world from 1990 to 2015, according to new research.
Carbon dioxide emissions rose by 60% over the 25-year period, but the increase in emissions from the richest 1% was three times greater than the increase in emissions from the poorest half.
The report, compiled by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, warned that rampant overconsumption and the rich world’s addiction to high-carbon transport are exhausting the world’s “carbon budget”.
Such a concentration of carbon emissions in the hands of the rich means that despite taking the world to the brink of climate catastrophe, through burning fossil fuels, we have still failed to improve the lives of billions, said Tim Gore, head of policy, advocacy and research at Oxfam International.
“The global carbon budget has been squandered to expand the consumption of the already rich, rather than to improve humanity,” he told the Guardian. “A finite amount of carbon can be added to the atmosphere if we want to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis. We need to ensure that carbon is used for the best.”
The richest 10% of the global population, comprising about 630 million people, were responsible for about 52% of global emissions over the 25-year period, the study showed.
Globally, the richest 10% are those with incomes above about $35,000 (£27,000) a year, and the richest 1% are people earning more than about $100,000.
[source: The Guardian, Sep 2020]
We rich folks in the west are really the main cause of the current environmental crisis. Most of the large scale industry in the east was created to appease our demand for luxury consumption, most of the fossil fuels are burned by or for the west (from oil and transport tankers to cruise ships and road transport). Most of the forest are cut down to provide the west with lumber, meat and ingredients for our luxury products, like palm oil.
This really is on us, and we should be careful to not try to move the blame to poor countries too much. They are a product of a system that was created to fulfill our needs and desires.
3 Likes
That’s all very well, but the Chinese aren’t running vast industries to supply the West because we’re making them do it. They’re doing it because they want in. They want wealth and a consumer lifestyle. Just as we are waking up to the fact that we need to do something about it, and fast, out efforts are being negated by the industrialisation of every country in the world that can manage it. They are increasingly creating their own internal consumer driven markets and suppling those as well as ours.
Take coal as an example. Absolutely the worst possible energy source you could choose. The UK has all but eliminated it (although bizarrely it’s still legal to burn it in your own home for some!) and yet the Chinese alone have negated the rest of the world’s reduction in coal consumption and are still building new coal fired power stations in large numbers today.
So I’m sorry, but blaming developed Western economies for everybody else’s degradation of the environment doesn’t cut it. We started it for sure, and I strongly believe that we should take unilateral action to clean up our own act in terms of pollution, consumerism and overpopulation. But unless every nation on Earth follows suit, it will be a complete waste of time.
2 Likes
The situation in China is a result of 30-40 years of industrialisation that was created by and for the west, we moved much of our industries there because we wanted cheap stuff and lots of it.
The UK can ban coal ofcourse, but it’s easier for the UK since a lot of the production has moved away to the east. As long as British citizens want the same amount of stuff flowing into the country for the same affordable prices, there has to be a large scale industry somewhere else that produces that stuff, and a transport system that moves it to the UK.
Obviously China has come to a point where they are now developed enough to drive their own internal markets as well, so they have as much responsibility to find solutions for the environmental problem that currently exists. It’s a global problem that affects everyone.
One planet asked another planet how he was feeling.
The planet replied “I don’t feel well; I’ve got Homo-sapiens”
The first planet said “Don’t worry, it will pass.”
8 Likes
5 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.