It’s impossible to talk about anything proportionately. Everything has to be a battle of all or nothing, good and evil, stasis or complete destruction. There are a number of things I’d like to talk about, and think about, with other people. But I’d like to talk about them shorn of the contemporary political overdetermination that engulfs every issue. This is harder by the day.
I’ve been identifying as old school leftie primarily due to environmental issues. If being being on “right” now means common sense solutions, I may be on the “right” now. Funny how things have changed.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we all asked each other What is worth conserving? What would progress look like to you? What do you think would make America great? instead of finger pointing and name calling.
I suspect the solution to most of our problems is to return to a human-scaled world. Literal localism.
I agree that most instinctively care about the environment in the 1970s sense. No one wants reservoirs with toxic waste dumped into them, or ecological collapse etc. But as you say it is now infused with global concerns we would not naturally concern ourselves with. People have been programmed.
So I think focusing on our immediate area is the best way and jettison the grander narratives. Is your local area clean and reasonably pollution free? Can the drainage be fixed with new regulations drawn up so future builds conform to better standards?
Alas localism is seen as old hat. Many dream of a science fiction future not the banal reality.
Yes you hit it right on target, old school wilderness preservation was about saving a particular unique local wild area, new school "environmentalism" is about leftist bureaucratic global social planning.
I had coined a phrase a long time ago that this reminds me of. "It doesn't matter how much money you donate to the cause. Someone still has to clean the cat boxes."
I was thinking about this also. Our county is setting up town climate action committees, I looked it up and it’s the usual BS. But then I was thinking, our whole street and the one over from us badly floods and has since at least the 70s. It may be getting worse, I’ve heard the drains aren’t big enough, and get clogged with trash, and I notice lots of new development right around the creek where it all comes out. And surely our street isn’t the only one in town with this problem! But we call the city and it’s just like, no one can tell us anything about where drains are, if there are underground ones already that are clogged, or possible ways to solve it- no one’s interested.
We can’t widen a drain, but don’t worry, our committees are going to get together and really figure out how to change the future weather 🙄
At this point I suspect it is a mental illness. As you say, a solvable, local problem that would make a real difference is ignored. All because cosmic justice must be served. It really is absurd.
The Progressive spirit of our age hates localism, it is uncontrollable. When the Dept of Ed is abolished, localism will again have a brief chance to flourish.
Josh, I’m 100% with you on this. I’d add that it’s so irritating that focus on “climate change” just hijacks all of the other, more actionable (and in my opinion, actually important) problems. You can tell most people are full of it on “climate change” anyway, because if we were serious about it, we would be hearing someone talk about the fact that our massive, unsustainable government debt is literally made to use resources now at the expense of the future. This is exactly what “stimulating the economy” is and yet no one I’ve heard connects the concepts. It fuels so much of the spending, single use stuff, misallocation and misuse of resources, and I’ve never heard anyone point that out. But yes, weird how the solution to fixing the climate is always a humongous amount of new spending.
You’re probably already aware of him, but Michael Shellenberger’s talks on YouTube are what I like to send to people to try to get them to see reason about it. He’s great because he deeply and genuinely cares about protecting the environment, and can talk first hand about how he went from personally trying to get solar/wind etc to work, realizing it makes the problem worse and why, and he publicly speaks about changing his mind. Another awesome resource is the Manhattan Contrarian blog. At this point if anyone believes that the popular renewable solutions to climate change are actually workable, you can just point them to thousands of essays on this blog detailing precisely what the many problems are.
"Nature conservation" which was a universal value has morphed into environmentalism which is now a derivative of marxism: anticapitalism. It is a talisman of the Left and anathema to the Right.
This absolutely. I feel the same concerns about this and other issues and wish we could talk about anything (something, one thing, please!) without retreating to our camps.
Read the local history and the old maps of your area. You see natural disasters are common but what specific types of disaster are in your area. So when someone says about the problems of today ask them a lot the great floods of the 1700s Also buy what you can in glass and wear wool, linen and cotton more then synthetics. These are the little things you can do. Good luck with rebuilding from a New Orleanian who rebuilt
Agree! I love wool! So much more functional than synthetics. It's a renewable resource via sheep (sheep are not harmed in the removal of wool from their bodies). Air out wool tee overnight and you can wear next day, no stink! I can wear light wool tees 9 months out of the year. July-Sept heat in midwest calls for light woven cotton to be happy.
I have huge concerns about toxicity and what is in our ground water and rain water. The pollution issue is huge and measurable and because it seems easily quantifiable, one would think that is an issue we can actually work on and see results with. Nope, because everything has gone to "climate change" which is amorphous, objectively NOT happening (The Corbett Report has a great segment on how scientists measure temperature and how NASA changes the way they measure temperature to affect the political debate), but is so catastrophic and terrifying to even think about that people are willing to give up so much human progress and their rights in order to "fight it."
Conveniently, mega corporations don't have to change much to "fight climate change"...they buy some carbon credits, throw money to NGOs, and make noise about sustainability. They're free to keep using Roundup, creating new chemicals. and putting everything in plastic.
I'm with you. Whenever my lefty friends talk about climate change and I disagree, they raise their hackles until I explain it's an issue meant to obfuscate a larger real problem--everything is toxic, we're living beyond our means, and ecosystems are struggling. But those same friends are also the ones who take many vacations by plane, have lots of new clothes, and buy toxic cleaning products and factory-farmed food (when they could afford other choices!). They don't want to hear they need to change and make due with less. It needs to be "fixed" for them. They think buying an electric car absolves them of our societal sins of gluttony, greed, and pride.
I am for a clean and healthy environment but I want to weigh that against the well-being of people, especially the poor. I refuse to buy into the David Attenboroughism that we are a cancer to the planet. Yes, we can be rough on it, but that doesn't mean we don't have our place here and that we can't do better.
Sep 2, 2023·edited Sep 2, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum
I actually love glass stuff. Baking dishes, you name it. You can always clean glass, it's just easy to work with.
I'm like you. How did people go from glass to plastic? Glass is infinitely recyclable.
I recently bought some Ball aluminum party cups (like Solo cups) but aluminum. Why? Because they're badass! I used to buy the plastic cups at Sam's Club, but my kids would run through them like Drano. It was becoming a pain in the ass, and nobody wants to wash and reuse those cups. They rot outside in a few days, they just plain suck. However, these aluminum cups can be washed and reused. And the kids are actually using them and not wasting them. And they will never sun rot.
I agree with you though, environmentalism is 100% emotional. That's why you have these dumbass protestors gluing their hands to the street. Nobody that encounters them is thinking, "Gee, I should do more to protect the environment." They are thinking, "What a bunch of dumbasses! What do these fruits hope to accomplish anyway!?" As a result, like you said, there is very little middle ground.
But I recycle the hell out of stuff. Because why not? If you have stuff laying around that can be repurposed, why not use it?
As I've always said, "The best thing you can do for the environment is to use the things that have already been manufactured, because manufacturing is FAR worse for the environment than anything else."
LED lights are the biggest example of this. Why the hell would any city throw out their giant stockpile of lights, to go with LED lights. The lights they already have in stock were manufactured long ago, and that damage was done. Why not put them to use, and transition over? Because that won't calm the green gods, that's why.
I have an interesting example.
One of the hospitals I used to do contract work in had a maintenance guy who went to the Honeywell school for systems repair. He was pretty badass. He always had the best stories.
He told me about this town his brother lived in somewhere in Michigan. They removed all of the existing incandescent traffic lights, and installed LED traffic lights to save on power. But they forgot one critical thing. The LED lights don’t generate much heat, and the lights froze over. In the winter people couldn’t even see the lights. The city had to send big trucks around and spray deicing compound on the traffic lights. The same stuff they use to deice airplane wings.
They never considered that the old lights generated enough heat in the winter to never freeze! So, they sent out large trucks, burning up who knows how much diesel fuel, spraying deicing compound everywhere -- all to help the environment right?
Then to top all of it off. The fix was to install heaters in each light cabinet, so that in the winter the lights wouldn’t freeze.
It was never about the environment. But someone made a lot of money selling those lights!
Glass can be reusable but is not easily recycled. Too many colors and types. Post consumer glass recycling is pretty much dead. Don't be fooled by most recycling plans, it's just two roads to the same landfill.
I know what you're getting at. I'm just talking about using the glass containers again. Washing them.
You don't have to melt them down if they are OK, and already in the shape needed. They recycle the plastic 5-gal water jugs, just like they used to clean and recycle the glass ones. They clean them out and refill them.
Thermos hot/cold containers used to be glass lined, because you can actually clean them. Stainless steel, well, it stains. Put coffee in a Yeti cup for a year, and have fun getting the stains out.
Also, if these yahoos were serious about saving the planet, they wouldn't care what color their glass drink bottles were. But none of this is really about saving the planet is it?
“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” – Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) circa 1960s
By bizarre coincidentally I stumbled upon this woman's substack today. Of course, she wants paid subscribers to comment only. Which is a shame, I would've liked to hear her reaction.
The link goes to a video with a dude basically saying suck up and go to your corporate job which is the wrong attitude IMO. He is correct people are in the post modern era are lazy, but just suffering through a PMC corporate gig because it pays well is what got us into this mess. We need to give up the toys and get back to basics like growing things, building things, and reading books. Slogging through a globalist PMC gig isn’t going to fix anything, it’s going to make life worse.
100 years of voting for big government Progressives is what got us into this mess. A license to steal, and sell influence. It's why the mega monopolies took over and localism died.
My trigger snaps whenever I hear people claim we need to/are going to save the earth, as if such a thing were possible. We will possibly destroy ourselves, and our luscious, human-created environment, but never the earth, which is indifferent to whether its surface is filled with molten lava or impenetrable ice sheets. We could blow a big, craggy a hole in it, and the earth would continue on rotating in space like a damaged Death Star. Space time insouciance.
The main problem with plastic is that we keep trying to recycle it, which leads to boatloads of it being shipped to China, much of which then gets dumped in the Pacific with the result that massive islands of plastic have congregated there. But, wait, unexpectedly, researchers are finding thriving ecosystems developing within them (https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/world/plastic-pollution-ocean-ecosystems-intl-climate/index.html), which only goes to show that looks can be, and often are, deceiving.
Decades ago a Harvard archaeologist (no link available) embarked on a dig somewhere on or near campus, burrowing down to a century ago. His discovery was that the baby diapers we most feared were not nearly as ubiquitous or as bad for the ground as were the thick piles of newsprint and magazines, which are filled with all kinds of carcinogens that leach into the soil. People worry about sea birds ingesting pieces of plastic, but as Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has discussed, birds use bits of plastic just as they use small rocks to digest food (https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/taxa/verts/archosaurs/gastroliths.php). Instead of recycling plastic, we should develop better systems of disposing of it in land fills that, absent chemical carcinogens, could serve as new areas of useful development.
All that said, it seems that the trend is toward smaller, more locally centric development, enabled by ubiquitous communications, as reflected by the trend toward working at home, which is hollowing out many downtown areas of the nation’s largest cities. Kind of like the Industrial Revolution shifting suddenly into reverse.
I agree wholeheartedly. Yesterday I was thinking about how I don’t even belong to a cause that’s been so near and dear to me my whole life. One more thing that’s been utterly contaminated. I don’t give money anymore to the major environmental groups, only to small ones like Xerces or independent animal rescue groups that have a very specific mission. The grift of the Green New Deal terrifies me. See Planet of the Humans for a crash course on how rotten that is. Today I woke up to a stack about Bill effin Gates new plan, for which he seeks govt money: cut down trees and burying them to reduce carbon. WTF! Coming from the guy who wants to block the sun and has created GMO mosquitoes, why am I shocked? Govts around the world are already spraying shit into the atmosphere to control it, like the freakazoids they are. Its easy for them to focus on carbon because it costs them nothing and is a cash cow. Actual environmental issues I think of and do something about: plastic waste, ocean and other pollution, erasure of natural spaces (prairies, grasslands, wetlands, forests, all of it), pollinator and wildlife health, due to urban and suburban sprawl, Regenerative agriculture vs Big Ag and Meat. I’ve been working on making my property a pollinator and wildlife garden, using composting and reducing waste. Remember when we switched from paper bags at the grocery store ti plastic? That was supposed to be pro environment. Lol. Screw these pendejos. I’ve been seeing a reversal of that in the food coops and environmentally conscious stores. That’s not all but some of the things I think about. Big Ag, Livestock, Energy won’t give up their abuses but everything around them is targeted, for the sake of more profit, imo. I don’t know what to do about the liberties these groups take with OUR environment. I do not grant permission for shite to be sprayed into the air I also breathe, the oceans that I swim in. It’s public. This shite i# done without our knowledge, never mind consent. The local mosquito spraying kills pollinators that I am trying to serve. We need to build our own new environmental movement, like everything else in the past few years. The one we had, or thought we had, has been coopted by industry/politics.
Yes. I’ve worried about how environmental issues are being totally sidetracked by nonsense and I believe most leftie enviro types will probably fall for it. I mean if you fell for the Covid nonsense you’ll probably fall for anything.
I'm naturally inclined to not want to fuck up our planet, as I think most people are. I just don't appreciate propaganda and managerial wet blankets dictating my every fucking move. They're banning boilers in our country, we'll have to he heat pumps to heat our homes. At what point did the politicians decide they could tell us how to heat our homes? At what point did we let them?
Other thought: I'm increasingly concerned about playing God. While I think some stewardship is good, is it even right to aim for net zero carbon? Is that actually best for the planet? How do you measure planetary benefit?
I may not know how to measure planetary benefit, but I do know that Schwab, Harari, Gates, Gore, Greta, Attenborough et al. are NOT the people to do it.
I agree with you re: environmental issues, especially plastic: A house can be broken in to; a computer can be hacked; but damn if I can open a jar securely sealed with plastic! Why hasn't science figured this one out? And it would be enjoyable if we could temporarily disable our alliances and talk & listen and banter with folks without the shortfalls pointed out.
I’ve been thinking like this since the 90s when I saw environmentalists and working class people purposely pitted against each other. Environmental issues are my #1 issue and I know all the problems can be solved in a way that doesnt hurt people. Yes local economies are of utmost and todays right seems more and more aligned with this idea. The climate change crap? Well, I really don’t care if a person “believes” in it or not if the solutions you propose or work for make sense. Mostly people who “believe” in it are clamoring for whatever solutions WEF types put forward as answer. Interestingly, I believed I could have talked to Kari Lake about real solutions- regenerative ranching etc-but not her interloper.
Plastic are even at another level when raising a child. I had to be hard core to not have the house taken over by cheap Chinese plastic crap. My daughter offended the dentist and girl scout leader by declining crappy junk they want to give everyone.
I’ve been identifying as old school leftie primarily due to environmental issues. If being being on “right” now means common sense solutions, I may be on the “right” now. Funny how things have changed.
In other words, we are become actual conservatives!
“Conservationists”
Wouldn’t it be nice if we all asked each other What is worth conserving? What would progress look like to you? What do you think would make America great? instead of finger pointing and name calling.
I suspect the solution to most of our problems is to return to a human-scaled world. Literal localism.
I agree that most instinctively care about the environment in the 1970s sense. No one wants reservoirs with toxic waste dumped into them, or ecological collapse etc. But as you say it is now infused with global concerns we would not naturally concern ourselves with. People have been programmed.
So I think focusing on our immediate area is the best way and jettison the grander narratives. Is your local area clean and reasonably pollution free? Can the drainage be fixed with new regulations drawn up so future builds conform to better standards?
Alas localism is seen as old hat. Many dream of a science fiction future not the banal reality.
Literal localism. I like that.
It also has the advantage of being unglamorous. It potentially attracts practical doers rather than people dreaming of the Senate or the White House.
Yes you hit it right on target, old school wilderness preservation was about saving a particular unique local wild area, new school "environmentalism" is about leftist bureaucratic global social planning.
Many of these causes are worn like a disguise for those with plans of their own. Every movement can be Stalinized, as they say.
Radical feminism is another example as was the Covid shenanigans.
I had coined a phrase a long time ago that this reminds me of. "It doesn't matter how much money you donate to the cause. Someone still has to clean the cat boxes."
I was thinking about this also. Our county is setting up town climate action committees, I looked it up and it’s the usual BS. But then I was thinking, our whole street and the one over from us badly floods and has since at least the 70s. It may be getting worse, I’ve heard the drains aren’t big enough, and get clogged with trash, and I notice lots of new development right around the creek where it all comes out. And surely our street isn’t the only one in town with this problem! But we call the city and it’s just like, no one can tell us anything about where drains are, if there are underground ones already that are clogged, or possible ways to solve it- no one’s interested.
We can’t widen a drain, but don’t worry, our committees are going to get together and really figure out how to change the future weather 🙄
At this point I suspect it is a mental illness. As you say, a solvable, local problem that would make a real difference is ignored. All because cosmic justice must be served. It really is absurd.
A huge number of environmental problems could be solved by good design but…
The Progressive spirit of our age hates localism, it is uncontrollable. When the Dept of Ed is abolished, localism will again have a brief chance to flourish.
The WEF call it "fragmentation", lol. That sums up their worldview right there.
Josh, I’m 100% with you on this. I’d add that it’s so irritating that focus on “climate change” just hijacks all of the other, more actionable (and in my opinion, actually important) problems. You can tell most people are full of it on “climate change” anyway, because if we were serious about it, we would be hearing someone talk about the fact that our massive, unsustainable government debt is literally made to use resources now at the expense of the future. This is exactly what “stimulating the economy” is and yet no one I’ve heard connects the concepts. It fuels so much of the spending, single use stuff, misallocation and misuse of resources, and I’ve never heard anyone point that out. But yes, weird how the solution to fixing the climate is always a humongous amount of new spending.
You’re probably already aware of him, but Michael Shellenberger’s talks on YouTube are what I like to send to people to try to get them to see reason about it. He’s great because he deeply and genuinely cares about protecting the environment, and can talk first hand about how he went from personally trying to get solar/wind etc to work, realizing it makes the problem worse and why, and he publicly speaks about changing his mind. Another awesome resource is the Manhattan Contrarian blog. At this point if anyone believes that the popular renewable solutions to climate change are actually workable, you can just point them to thousands of essays on this blog detailing precisely what the many problems are.
"Nature conservation" which was a universal value has morphed into environmentalism which is now a derivative of marxism: anticapitalism. It is a talisman of the Left and anathema to the Right.
This absolutely. I feel the same concerns about this and other issues and wish we could talk about anything (something, one thing, please!) without retreating to our camps.
Yeah, that is SO true. There's stuff I'd like to be able to talk about, too.
Read the local history and the old maps of your area. You see natural disasters are common but what specific types of disaster are in your area. So when someone says about the problems of today ask them a lot the great floods of the 1700s Also buy what you can in glass and wear wool, linen and cotton more then synthetics. These are the little things you can do. Good luck with rebuilding from a New Orleanian who rebuilt
Agree! I love wool! So much more functional than synthetics. It's a renewable resource via sheep (sheep are not harmed in the removal of wool from their bodies). Air out wool tee overnight and you can wear next day, no stink! I can wear light wool tees 9 months out of the year. July-Sept heat in midwest calls for light woven cotton to be happy.
I couldn't agree more Josh.
I have huge concerns about toxicity and what is in our ground water and rain water. The pollution issue is huge and measurable and because it seems easily quantifiable, one would think that is an issue we can actually work on and see results with. Nope, because everything has gone to "climate change" which is amorphous, objectively NOT happening (The Corbett Report has a great segment on how scientists measure temperature and how NASA changes the way they measure temperature to affect the political debate), but is so catastrophic and terrifying to even think about that people are willing to give up so much human progress and their rights in order to "fight it."
Conveniently, mega corporations don't have to change much to "fight climate change"...they buy some carbon credits, throw money to NGOs, and make noise about sustainability. They're free to keep using Roundup, creating new chemicals. and putting everything in plastic.
I'm with you. Whenever my lefty friends talk about climate change and I disagree, they raise their hackles until I explain it's an issue meant to obfuscate a larger real problem--everything is toxic, we're living beyond our means, and ecosystems are struggling. But those same friends are also the ones who take many vacations by plane, have lots of new clothes, and buy toxic cleaning products and factory-farmed food (when they could afford other choices!). They don't want to hear they need to change and make due with less. It needs to be "fixed" for them. They think buying an electric car absolves them of our societal sins of gluttony, greed, and pride.
I am for a clean and healthy environment but I want to weigh that against the well-being of people, especially the poor. I refuse to buy into the David Attenboroughism that we are a cancer to the planet. Yes, we can be rough on it, but that doesn't mean we don't have our place here and that we can't do better.
I actually love glass stuff. Baking dishes, you name it. You can always clean glass, it's just easy to work with.
I'm like you. How did people go from glass to plastic? Glass is infinitely recyclable.
I recently bought some Ball aluminum party cups (like Solo cups) but aluminum. Why? Because they're badass! I used to buy the plastic cups at Sam's Club, but my kids would run through them like Drano. It was becoming a pain in the ass, and nobody wants to wash and reuse those cups. They rot outside in a few days, they just plain suck. However, these aluminum cups can be washed and reused. And the kids are actually using them and not wasting them. And they will never sun rot.
I agree with you though, environmentalism is 100% emotional. That's why you have these dumbass protestors gluing their hands to the street. Nobody that encounters them is thinking, "Gee, I should do more to protect the environment." They are thinking, "What a bunch of dumbasses! What do these fruits hope to accomplish anyway!?" As a result, like you said, there is very little middle ground.
But I recycle the hell out of stuff. Because why not? If you have stuff laying around that can be repurposed, why not use it?
As I've always said, "The best thing you can do for the environment is to use the things that have already been manufactured, because manufacturing is FAR worse for the environment than anything else."
LED lights are the biggest example of this. Why the hell would any city throw out their giant stockpile of lights, to go with LED lights. The lights they already have in stock were manufactured long ago, and that damage was done. Why not put them to use, and transition over? Because that won't calm the green gods, that's why.
I have an interesting example.
One of the hospitals I used to do contract work in had a maintenance guy who went to the Honeywell school for systems repair. He was pretty badass. He always had the best stories.
He told me about this town his brother lived in somewhere in Michigan. They removed all of the existing incandescent traffic lights, and installed LED traffic lights to save on power. But they forgot one critical thing. The LED lights don’t generate much heat, and the lights froze over. In the winter people couldn’t even see the lights. The city had to send big trucks around and spray deicing compound on the traffic lights. The same stuff they use to deice airplane wings.
They never considered that the old lights generated enough heat in the winter to never freeze! So, they sent out large trucks, burning up who knows how much diesel fuel, spraying deicing compound everywhere -- all to help the environment right?
Then to top all of it off. The fix was to install heaters in each light cabinet, so that in the winter the lights wouldn’t freeze.
It was never about the environment. But someone made a lot of money selling those lights!
Great post.
Love this! And I too love glass--we have a local dairy who delivers milk every week in glass and i love it. Costs more but it’s worth it.
Everything tastes better in glass, especially milk.
Soda, too.
Glass can be reusable but is not easily recycled. Too many colors and types. Post consumer glass recycling is pretty much dead. Don't be fooled by most recycling plans, it's just two roads to the same landfill.
I know what you're getting at. I'm just talking about using the glass containers again. Washing them.
You don't have to melt them down if they are OK, and already in the shape needed. They recycle the plastic 5-gal water jugs, just like they used to clean and recycle the glass ones. They clean them out and refill them.
Thermos hot/cold containers used to be glass lined, because you can actually clean them. Stainless steel, well, it stains. Put coffee in a Yeti cup for a year, and have fun getting the stains out.
Also, if these yahoos were serious about saving the planet, they wouldn't care what color their glass drink bottles were. But none of this is really about saving the planet is it?
“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” – Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) circa 1960s
We are making the same point about glass. You are absolutely correct about the Revolution. All struggle all the time.
"Being left today is feminine." I don't know if you saw this: https://youtu.be/ivCyVr7qJ_I?si=jjfHs54aNh8BH6bN
By bizarre coincidentally I stumbled upon this woman's substack today. Of course, she wants paid subscribers to comment only. Which is a shame, I would've liked to hear her reaction.
The link goes to a video with a dude basically saying suck up and go to your corporate job which is the wrong attitude IMO. He is correct people are in the post modern era are lazy, but just suffering through a PMC corporate gig because it pays well is what got us into this mess. We need to give up the toys and get back to basics like growing things, building things, and reading books. Slogging through a globalist PMC gig isn’t going to fix anything, it’s going to make life worse.
100 years of voting for big government Progressives is what got us into this mess. A license to steal, and sell influence. It's why the mega monopolies took over and localism died.
What does this have to do with my post?
My trigger snaps whenever I hear people claim we need to/are going to save the earth, as if such a thing were possible. We will possibly destroy ourselves, and our luscious, human-created environment, but never the earth, which is indifferent to whether its surface is filled with molten lava or impenetrable ice sheets. We could blow a big, craggy a hole in it, and the earth would continue on rotating in space like a damaged Death Star. Space time insouciance.
The main problem with plastic is that we keep trying to recycle it, which leads to boatloads of it being shipped to China, much of which then gets dumped in the Pacific with the result that massive islands of plastic have congregated there. But, wait, unexpectedly, researchers are finding thriving ecosystems developing within them (https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/world/plastic-pollution-ocean-ecosystems-intl-climate/index.html), which only goes to show that looks can be, and often are, deceiving.
Decades ago a Harvard archaeologist (no link available) embarked on a dig somewhere on or near campus, burrowing down to a century ago. His discovery was that the baby diapers we most feared were not nearly as ubiquitous or as bad for the ground as were the thick piles of newsprint and magazines, which are filled with all kinds of carcinogens that leach into the soil. People worry about sea birds ingesting pieces of plastic, but as Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has discussed, birds use bits of plastic just as they use small rocks to digest food (https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/taxa/verts/archosaurs/gastroliths.php). Instead of recycling plastic, we should develop better systems of disposing of it in land fills that, absent chemical carcinogens, could serve as new areas of useful development.
All that said, it seems that the trend is toward smaller, more locally centric development, enabled by ubiquitous communications, as reflected by the trend toward working at home, which is hollowing out many downtown areas of the nation’s largest cities. Kind of like the Industrial Revolution shifting suddenly into reverse.
I agree wholeheartedly. Yesterday I was thinking about how I don’t even belong to a cause that’s been so near and dear to me my whole life. One more thing that’s been utterly contaminated. I don’t give money anymore to the major environmental groups, only to small ones like Xerces or independent animal rescue groups that have a very specific mission. The grift of the Green New Deal terrifies me. See Planet of the Humans for a crash course on how rotten that is. Today I woke up to a stack about Bill effin Gates new plan, for which he seeks govt money: cut down trees and burying them to reduce carbon. WTF! Coming from the guy who wants to block the sun and has created GMO mosquitoes, why am I shocked? Govts around the world are already spraying shit into the atmosphere to control it, like the freakazoids they are. Its easy for them to focus on carbon because it costs them nothing and is a cash cow. Actual environmental issues I think of and do something about: plastic waste, ocean and other pollution, erasure of natural spaces (prairies, grasslands, wetlands, forests, all of it), pollinator and wildlife health, due to urban and suburban sprawl, Regenerative agriculture vs Big Ag and Meat. I’ve been working on making my property a pollinator and wildlife garden, using composting and reducing waste. Remember when we switched from paper bags at the grocery store ti plastic? That was supposed to be pro environment. Lol. Screw these pendejos. I’ve been seeing a reversal of that in the food coops and environmentally conscious stores. That’s not all but some of the things I think about. Big Ag, Livestock, Energy won’t give up their abuses but everything around them is targeted, for the sake of more profit, imo. I don’t know what to do about the liberties these groups take with OUR environment. I do not grant permission for shite to be sprayed into the air I also breathe, the oceans that I swim in. It’s public. This shite i# done without our knowledge, never mind consent. The local mosquito spraying kills pollinators that I am trying to serve. We need to build our own new environmental movement, like everything else in the past few years. The one we had, or thought we had, has been coopted by industry/politics.
Yes. I’ve worried about how environmental issues are being totally sidetracked by nonsense and I believe most leftie enviro types will probably fall for it. I mean if you fell for the Covid nonsense you’ll probably fall for anything.
unrelated, but also interesting https://open.substack.com/pub/public/p/christine-brophy-narcissism-and-agreeableness?r=b7oia&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I'm naturally inclined to not want to fuck up our planet, as I think most people are. I just don't appreciate propaganda and managerial wet blankets dictating my every fucking move. They're banning boilers in our country, we'll have to he heat pumps to heat our homes. At what point did the politicians decide they could tell us how to heat our homes? At what point did we let them?
Other thought: I'm increasingly concerned about playing God. While I think some stewardship is good, is it even right to aim for net zero carbon? Is that actually best for the planet? How do you measure planetary benefit?
I may not know how to measure planetary benefit, but I do know that Schwab, Harari, Gates, Gore, Greta, Attenborough et al. are NOT the people to do it.
"Gaiapocalypse"! Nice word play there!
I agree with you re: environmental issues, especially plastic: A house can be broken in to; a computer can be hacked; but damn if I can open a jar securely sealed with plastic! Why hasn't science figured this one out? And it would be enjoyable if we could temporarily disable our alliances and talk & listen and banter with folks without the shortfalls pointed out.
I’ve been thinking like this since the 90s when I saw environmentalists and working class people purposely pitted against each other. Environmental issues are my #1 issue and I know all the problems can be solved in a way that doesnt hurt people. Yes local economies are of utmost and todays right seems more and more aligned with this idea. The climate change crap? Well, I really don’t care if a person “believes” in it or not if the solutions you propose or work for make sense. Mostly people who “believe” in it are clamoring for whatever solutions WEF types put forward as answer. Interestingly, I believed I could have talked to Kari Lake about real solutions- regenerative ranching etc-but not her interloper.
Plastic are even at another level when raising a child. I had to be hard core to not have the house taken over by cheap Chinese plastic crap. My daughter offended the dentist and girl scout leader by declining crappy junk they want to give everyone.