This is far more pressing than the climate crisis, but people don’t seem to prioritize it:
One third of all arable farmland has become desertified in the last couple decades as people are in a race to the bottom (just as USA was in the Great Depression leading to the dust bowl)
Biodiversity has plummeted as species go extinct, only to be replaced by farms and monocultures
Insect populations are plummeting
Forests are being decimated
The boomer through millenial generations think they’re smarter than previous ones but they are in fact like an irresponsible kid living on an ecological credit card, that their children will have to pay.
Child mortality was solved but humanity was slow to adjust their birth rates to compensate for it.
Falling birth rates have little to do with child mortality and everything to do with child labor becoming less valuable due to legality as well as industrialization. Children became liabilities instead of assets to parents, parents had less kids. And the current problem is actually not enough people are going to be around to maintain the current economy of scale both in terms of production and consumption. The demographic cliff looming in Italy and China for instance will probably alleviate some of these environmental issues we are discussing, but at the cost of political instability.
If climate change would be causing this then insects and butterfly would move into colder zones like many other animals and plants in fact do. Instead, they are disappearing everywhere. It is due to pesticides and monoculture agriculture.
Which is worse in your opinion: smoke, or CO2? (Defining smoke broadly.)
It's a real question: Diesel motors make less CO2, but more smoke (of lots of types).
Would you rather spray some pesticide on crops? Or would it be better to use an energy intensive tractor (lots of CO2) to handle the situation mechanically?
The world currently is obsessed with CO2, and I think that's a huge mistake - the other types of pollution are worse.
It may not have anything to do with the greenhouse gas effect and emission of fossil fuels.
The desertification has to do with farmers planting too much and extracting all nutrients from the soil - same as happened in the 1930s which didnt have to do with cars and cows and methane in the atmosphere.
The overfishing - same thing
The collapse of insect populations is highly unlikely due to the slight aberage temperature changes or carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. It may be due to wireless radio signals, or light pollution, or pesticides and GMO plants.
The collapse of kelp forests or bleaching of coral reefs also has less to do with acidification of the oceans, and more with local pollution and ecosystem collapse.
The extinction of some species is due to hunting.
And so on. You could say the anthopocene is behind all these things — but that is not the same as saying that climate change is CAUSING these things.
If A (human activity) is causing B and C, and nearly all we talk about is C, then it is valid to say that B is more pressing, and that we should focus on A causing B. The response that “C is linked to B” is not enough because C doesn’t cause B and talking about C doesn’t do anything to stop B.
"suspecting" is not exactly the standard that I am looking for when making statements of such importance.
And their "suspecting" is certainly nowhere near good enough reason to not draw attention to other things such as pesticides, light pollution and other radio electromagnetic pollution
I'm a millennial, this is the first time I've personally noticed my own generation sharing the blame and it makes me defensive. I suppose it's true enough though.
I do vote on these issues, and I do what little I can for the environment; I don't use pesticides on my 100 square foot farm (more commonly called a "garden"). So long as we're on the topic of blaming entire generations though -- will more than 30% of Gen Z join us in voting any time soon? We could use the votes.
Where I am, we don’t have these poppy names for The Generations: people are just younger and older. As a consequence (perhaps), there’s less boxing of people into clearly delineated (like Millenial: roughly born 1980–1998 or something) groups for other groups to piss and moan about.
Millennials are every bit as good as the boomers for having a blizzard of excuses about why they can't possibly be inconvenienced, it just sounds a bit more nuanced. This website is full of it.
And the idea that voting does anything real is kind of cute, that's literally the least you can do and should take all of 5 minutes every couple of months these days.
I've made an effort to switch about half my food purchases to sustainable meat & veg... it's frankly a bit too costly as it stands to go 100%, but I suspect that's mostly because it is more niche and trendy than purely higher operational costs.
Switching back to (wax)paper wrapping and bulk supplies in general with paper baggies would probably help a bit. The demonization of paper/wood always bugged me as it's generally a renewable resource, and at least in N. America mostly used as such. It also inherently pulls carbon from the atmosphere. As opposed to refined plastics.
I've also avoided refined foods much more over the past decade. As much for health related issues as for any ecological factor. But the changes in hormonal balance in people in general, in particular in men, is pretty startling. While I can understand the desire to let it all happen and reduce populations, I think the methods are worse than the problem at this point. I don't think it's generally a conspiracy, only that refined foods are simply not as good for you, and hormonal issues abound in the past half century to century in particular.
> Millennials are every bit as good as the boomers for having a blizzard of excuses about why they can't possibly be inconvenienced, it just sounds a bit more nuanced. This website is full of it.
The idea that this problem is solvable by individuals changing their behavior when there is a vast ocean of money being deployed to keep everything (roughly) the same is pretty laughable. Changing the behaviour of a large population first requires them to agree on what the problem is in the first place. "Energy" interests have done a good job of clouding the issue and providing enough plausible deniability for continuing the status quo.
Here's a relevant example: a generation of people have been convinced to recycle - but those efforts were largely wasted because the collected material was shipped to China (!) and sometimes dumped in the ocean (!!). So individuals did their part, but "the system" is still going to optimize for cost-efficiency and not for environmental impact.
No way, man! You just have to do things like recycle plastic… not wait, that was a propaganda campaign by the plastic industry in order to market plastic as being more long-term viable for the environment and “sustainability”.
Well, you can reduce your carbon footprint!… wait, British Petroleum invented that slogan, didn’t they…
> The idea that this problem is solvable by individuals changing their behavior
I don't think that individuals can solve climate change without having government and corporations change.
But governments and corporations won't ever change without action by individuals to pressure them to change.
Activism on the part of individuals turning into collective action is the kind of thing that would produce actual change, not actions like plastic recycling.
But again there's a failure of the Millennial generation for you. You've figured out the individual actions which don't work and which you've been led down an alley by moneyed interests into thinking they're effective, but you have no answers to effecting change past pointing blame.
I would suggest starting with individual study and observation. Too much activism is pushed from emotion, and it all reaches a point where it just comes across as noise. I think what's needed is a balance of the passion combined with knowledge and understanding.
Getting involved in local politics and making small changes in a progressive direction as opposed to trying to save the world. A good example are communities that are supporting local growers/producers and freeing them from some of the national/state level red tape. Improving the chain of supply more locally and increasing awareness. This is much harder in larger cities though... as local foods are less diverse and less universally available year-round.
Working with local restaurants that aren't chains and trying to build local sustainable menus. Moving away from refined products to more local.
As it stands, it's very niche and trendy, which can come across as off-putting or out of touch. But working locally can be very impactful. If you can convince one restaurant to move at least part of their menu to local supply, that can help. Being closer to the source will lead you to connecting with the source and having a better understanding.
There are a lot of people out there, working on actually making their small parts work... connecting these people is really hard. I've been pushing for years talking to local restaurants to try to get them to move away from refined seed oils for cooking alone, and it often falls on deaf ears.
Shop and advocate for local coop markets that have sustainable practices.
Unfortunately, it's hard to fight the convenience/abundance of Wal-Mart, Amazon and Costco. I have enough trouble convincing my SO to hit a couple different grocery stores in a day, as opposed to trying to get everything needed in one convenient stop.
I can say at least with food... sustainable food is much more expensive than factory production. And it's likely as much to do with the trendiness than pure costs, which are also quite a bit higher/harder. Meat alone is generally 2-3x as expensive. This doesn't account for higher waste from not vacuum/nitrogen packing everything in plastic either.
One third of all arable farmland has become desertified in the last couple decades as people are in a race to the bottom (just as USA was in the Great Depression leading to the dust bowl)
Biodiversity has plummeted as species go extinct, only to be replaced by farms and monocultures
Insect populations are plummeting
Forests are being decimated
The boomer through millenial generations think they’re smarter than previous ones but they are in fact like an irresponsible kid living on an ecological credit card, that their children will have to pay.
Child mortality was solved but humanity was slow to adjust their birth rates to compensate for it.