[carbonmachine]

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 of time to doing something to solve the problem, but I'm not certain if there's anything pragmatic to be done against big areas of environmental concern like this, global warming, ocean acidity, and etc.

[beambot]

> 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.

[eksu]

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, outstanding fisheries would be in Alaska & New Zealand) allow us to extract protien we all need without destroying ecosystems. Same goes for captured game but that scales significantly worse.

Fish farms are in a unique position because unlike farming animals on land, it can be done without radically changing the part of the ocean the fish are farmed in.

I think recently there have been some problems with fish farms and antibiotic / illness spreading but I really think these can be overcome and that long term aquaculture would be the most environmentally conscious option. (In a similar position to electric cars today).

[e12e]

> Fish farms are in a unique position because unlike farming animals on land, it can be done without radically changing the part of the ocean the fish are farmed in.

Fish farms are a little like farming rabbits in packed, huge fenced in areas.

You get a lot of disease, use a lot of medicine and antibiotics - and get a lot of feces. And escaped, diseased rabbits that breed in the wild.

Fish farms on land are likely better - but at any rate, fish farms are far from being without environmental impact.

[devmunchies]

> 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.

[jm2721]

Are you serious? Most of the plant substitutes for meat are based off nutrient-devoid grains, soy, and corn. It's also not at all an inefficient way to get calories; fat packs the most calories per gram, and fat (especially saturated fat) is not easily available in plants unless you're making a concerted effort to eat avocados, olives, and coconuts. I'd rather eat a fatty steak and be satiated for hours, than have the same calories from quinoa (or some other 'healthy' grain) and be ravenous 2 hours later when my insulin levels drop.

[carbonmachine]

You make a compelling point. If I wanted to support one of those companies by purchasing their products, what would I look for? Any chance salmon is among the fish that are well farmed?

[t420mom]

Factory-farmed meat is bad for humans and bad for the environment, true, but any industrial-scale monoculture crop has huge negative impacts, and that includes vegetables too.

Better to avoid monocultures by buying organic/biodynamic, shopping at farmers' markets, CSA, growing your own food, etc. Eat less processed and make more from scratch. Better health, better for the environment, and you can still enjoy meat :)

[carbonmachine]

I've long had a scifi vision of the future in which autonomous drones intelligently, with sustainability as a goal, hunt wild fish as a good way around the factory meat problem. Only slightly related, just wanted to share some techno-optimism.

[Roritharr]

Techno-Optimism nowadays includes Hunting Robots. What a time to be alive.

[devmunchies]

True, but it doesn't scale. Good luck if you live in a metro area.

[zo7]

How so? In San Francisco there are several local produce markets within walking distance of where I live. Whole Foods and Trader Joe's are pretty common major grocery chains here, and there are two weekly farmer's markets I can think of that are accessible by bike/transit.

When I visited Manhattan/Brooklyn recently I didn't get the sense that they were lacking in locally-sourced foods either. Main problem I can think of are food deserts, but those are more of an economic problem than scale. When I used to live in one in Baltimore though it was possible to find local food, it just took more effort.

[devmunchies]

this part specifically:

> growing your own food

I should have quoted that directly in my original comment.

[emiliobumachar]

If there was demand for it, every other apartment building rooftop could include a greenhouse.

[devmunchies]

you would need much more than a rooftop to feed a high rise apt building, no?

[emiliobumachar]

Correct, but a rooftop would put a sizeable dent in the building's need to bring in food.

[avar]

    > 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...

[jm2721]

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.

[avar]

No, I believe you're missing the point.

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.

1. http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/514

[dragonwriter]

> net environmental impact (carbon emissions)

“environmental impact” and “carbon emissions” are not the same thing; the latter is a very limited subset of the former.

[avar]

Yes, but generally those will average out, and other than carbon emissions the environmental impact tends to get pretty well priced into the end product because it tends to be more land or resources that are required.

I put "carbon emissions" in parentheses there because the reason for this "buy local" fallacy to begin with is because people intuitively assume that it's the transportation of the good that makes all the difference, when the reality is that that's just 1/10 of the cost.

The environmental impact of the transportation is almost exclusively carbon emissions.

[hycaria]

Why does everyone seem to forget the essential "have less kids" one ?

This is what puts me into the defeatist group. As long as people won't even put their reproductive urges in question (and rather discuss how flying is bad), how are we even supposed to achieve anything ? This should be one of the first logical moves, yet it's so frowned upon it's never brought up. Depressing.

[TheGrassyKnoll]

Totally agree. Condoms people ! USE EM !

[jm2721]

"Eat less meat" is not a good solution since industrialized monocrop agriculture has tons of problems on its own like topsoil erosion and air/water pollution. The problem doesn't lie in any one single food, but in commercial food production in general, be it livestock or agricultural. If you want to help against that, the best option would be to support sustainably raised meat and vegetables from local farms by going to farmers markets or eating out at farm-to-table restaurants. If possible, plant your own vegetables, raise your own chickens or hunt. Avoid buying from the big food producers, like Kraft, Tyson, PepsiCo or ConAgra

[jopsen]

Buy organic too

[spodek]

People here argue things like that if whole industries, laws, etc don't change then an individual's actions don't matter.

I see it the opposite. Only if I change can I expect or hope anyone else will.

My list includes:

- Flying less

- Driving less

- Eating low on the food chain

- Avoiding packaged food

- Owning and acquiring less stuff

... things like that.

My life has never been better. I wish I had started this change decades earlier.

[Eyes]

Not sure how much of a frequent flyer you'd have to be to make a conscious decision to fly less. I'm certainly not there.

[rebuilder]

Flying once a year will, for most people, form a significant percentage of their total CO2 footprint. So cutting that in half by flying once every two years would already be a big improvement.

Flying 5000 KM apparently produces approximately 1 ton of CO2. The 2010 rate average CO2 footprint per capita was about 7 tons a year, and the goal by 2050, if we mean to have a reasonable chance of keeping warming by 2100 to less than 2 degrees centigrade from pre-industrial levels, is a bit over 2 tons. So if you fly at all, making a conscious decision to fly less will help.[1]

Yes, the requirements to meet that goal of sub-2-degree warming by 2100 are pretty severe.

[1]http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/carbon-targets-for-your-footp...

[Tharkun]

I've been on a plane exactlt twice in my life. It's pretty easy not to fly.

[jopsen]

And your right, individual action won't scale...

For the US you have a lot of work to do before you have a moderately decent working political system.

[jackmodern]

to me this implies you don't travel or go out much. so what do you do for fun then?

[maxander]

I don’t see where you get that implication. Perhaps they’re spending a month in France rather than taking three one-week trips. Perhaps they’re living closer to town so that they don’t drive as much to get to work and their local hacker club. There’s lots of ways you can reorganize your life to be less resource-intensive without meaningful sacrifice, especially if you’re starting from the immensely wasteful late-20th-century-middle-class lifestyle.

[colordrops]

All you have to do is take on less flight in your life to make a huge impact. The carbon output per person of a round trip flight from NY to Phoenix is 806 pounds.

http://gscleanenergy.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-much-gas-does-...

[spodek]

It's one of the best decisions I've made. I have more adventure, culture, cuisine, and other values I used to get from travel, without the pollution and emissions.

I posted about it here -- https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/365-days-without-flying.ht..., although my views have continued to evolve since then -- and on my blog.

[justinator]

I haven't been in a plane myself in 4 years. I got months without getting in a car. I'm up to my ears in adventure.

But it's not enough, right? We're completely dependent on cheap sources of fossil fuels to drive our economy. How much carbon is released in the atmosphere from just me eating food?

[Tharkun]

Ah yes, life without flying must be so dull. Is that what you're implying? Seems rather silly.

[guelo]

> Only if I change can I expect or hope anyone else will

This makes no logical sense. Only if I fly to the moon can I ever expect anyone else too? Some things require collective action at the government level.

[has2k1]

Singular persons influence people, ..., attitudes change and then governments react.

[vacri]

> Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do?

Yep, stop focusing on the movie-style end-of-the-world apocalypse, where it's just you and your guns versus the raiders. Instead of planning what you're going to do when it all turns to crap, do stuff now. In short, fix the world you're in, rather than planning for a world which really isn't going to happen.

Talking to politicians is the first thing you can do - if they don't hear the noise, they're never going to do anything about it, and they're the decision-makers. Change your behaviours as other commentators have stated. Talk to your friends so they at least have heard the issue.

But don't pretend that you're going to go off into the woods and survive like in a movie - if society ever did go that far, then you're fucked anyway - no doctors, no hospitals, no emergency services, no entertainment, no travel, so on and so forth. Few of us are actually comfortable with the idea of living permanently off the land (those survival rations won't last very long).

[Jach]

Go into crispr research or other biological engineering fields if you want to do something directly. Figure out how to make less toxic pesticides that are economically substitutable (break-even or only slightly more costly than existing ones) rather than demanding that they're banned entirely, or if you're satisfied those exist already, lobby for their use. I suspect that whatever preventable problems we face we're not going to unite as a big collective to prevent them, especially when incentives don't align, but a few teams will be able to engineer solutions when the problems become actualized. Instead of asking how do we prevent problems, ask how we can solve problems given that they occur.

[sitkack]

I am going into crispr to make pesticide immune versions of all the bugs we currently have. Effect change where you can.

[sitepodmatt]

Wouldn't that eventually mean you starve a large portion of the population as crop yields shrink dramatically?

[jopsen]

It's certainly a decent plot for a bond movie.

Pesticide resistant super bugs could probably breed and eat all our crops in no time.

[sitkack]

Let Them Eat Bugs!

[dbcurtis]

People are actually seriously proposing that. Very high in protein, and very efficient at converting feed to protein.

I'm not sure it will catch on fast....

More seriously, we need to be pursuing sustainable agricultural practices. I believe that means treating crop fields as the complex microbiomes that they should be, instead of highly-tilled, species-restricted biomes. Read up on how no-till and low-till farming practices change the soil communities of worms and microbes. It's huge. We need to move away from heavy reliance on pesticide and herbicide for the health of the soil and environment neighboring the fields, not to mention our own.

The thing is, we got to heavy chemical agriculture in part because of a drive to lower fuel consumption by making fewer passes over the field doing mechanical weed disruption. Of course, mechanical weed disruption is the kind of tillage that disrupts the soil biome, so we shouldn't go back, anyway, even if you could magically make diesel fuel cost $0. We need a new way forward to feed a hungry planet in a sustainable fashion.

[pvaldes]

>Eat bugs

Now deliciously enriched with 35% more of weedkillers

[Amygaz]

Basically, you're going to engineer new insects... I love it! I'm in! Can't wait to see the big chemical companies' faces when they see a poster on new breeds resistant to everything they have on the market or contemplating to put on the market.

[sitkack]

I was thinking some combination of carpenter ant, a beetle and a mantis. It would nice if it had wings so it could spread faster, the ant and the mantis are intelligent. It would be nice if it could live off leavings of a 25-35 year old yuppie, so unused airtime minutes and a mixture of dried latte foam and eco-plastic.

I wonder if we could infuse it with some Octopus brain matter? Also, I'd like it to have the ability to remember across generations, but Octopus probably already do this.

[christophilus]

I think supporting permaculture is a big step we can all take. Have a look at Ben Falk's YouTube videos for a quick intro, or Sepp Holzer. We need to move towards a form of agriculture which does active good for the planet. It's possible to do.

Edit: Also, a simple step: leave parts of your lawn unmowed for a full year. This gives insects and certain endangered birds much needed habitat in what is otherwise a wasteland of suburbian lawns.

[okreallywtf]

It frustrates me that even though I am not in a HOA area, I cannot do this without getting letters from the city and fines. They will come mow my lawn for me and then charge me if I don't keep them mowed. Even my back yard which is almost 100% enclosed. I rent, otherwise I would build a wall right against my neighbors property so they wouldn't call the city on me for being able to see through a 5 foot gap into the back yard. I try to be considerate and keep the front and side clean but they even complained about there being too much wildlife back there (as if that was a bad thing). I usually have a whole bunny family living back there with birds and lots of bugs but eventually I have to mow it or have it mowed for me at my expense.

[christophilus]

Where the heck do you live? I'm in a small town in the south east coast of the US. I'm pretty sure our city crew would get fired (or shot) here for trying to forcibly mow someone's yard without their consent.

[okreallywtf]

A decent sized city in the south east, its a common complaint around here but other people have done more to fight it. Since I don't own I haven't really pushed it but if I did I think I would. My guess is that it all has to do with property values, if I built a nice garden in the front lawn and it looked great it would be fine. Letting it just grow up not so much which is why I limit it to the back yard but my uptight neighbors don't want to be next to wildlife.

[soundwave106]

I live in a large town in the southeast and that is indeed our county's policy: http://www.pinellascounty.org/code-enforcement/enforcement-c...

That said, "Florida friendly landscaping" (creating a yard that can adequately handle Florida's natural irrigation, which is not necessarily grass oriented) has been steadily growing in support. In fact, it's actually illegal for an HOA to prevent a Florida friendly landscape (https://www.volusia.org/core/fileparse.php/4163/urlt/HOAs.pd...), although in practice a lot of HOAs still enforce a "thou must have a large thirsty St. Augustine grass front lawn" code.

[buttcoinslol]

The key word is 'I rent'. Rental properties can be subject to more restrictions than owner-occupied properties and people who care enough to complain to the city (generally homeowners calling on rental properties) know when the laws of a jurisdiction is in their favor.

Where I live, the city has the power to abate nuisances, which involves notifying the property owner with a period of time given to bring the cited issue into compliance. If the property owner fails to correct the issue, city workers correct it and the property owner is billed an (outrageous) hourly rate, minimum 1 hour.

[okreallywtf]

I'm not sure that it makes that much of a difference, the city doesn't seem to care who reads the letter or who pays the fine but it does affect how much I fight it and what I can do to get around it.

[devmunchies]

I wish there was a way to make it popular for people to let their yard grow wild and make it taboo to mow your lawn.

[dbcurtis]

Ha! That's easy. In California, we call that "drought". A couple of years ago, having a green lawn was Extremely Incorrect in my neighborhood.

[Tempest1981]

Yep, dead lawns and waist-high weeds. See it all the time. No nuisance enforcement. Although after the fast-spreading fires, I wonder if that will change?

[anigbrowl]

That's how my backyard is and I love it. I clear some dead plant matter and don't barbecue things. I do have a solar stove that uses a parabolic reflector and prefer using it to the gas grill now.

[m_mueller]

Not that I've planned it for that reason, but my family has the documents to live in either Japan or Switzerland. Both seem reasonable bets to me, i.e. protected by geography and with a pretty resilient local population.

Have a read on the Bronze age collapse - when the global economy collapses, the main danger won't be environmental but due to human migration. In a functioning economy I'm very liberally minded towards freedom of movement (and in fact this lessens the danger I'm describing), but in a collapse, global inequality will come back to haunt the developed world in an apocalyptic fashion.

[losteric]

The developed world will use the first wave of immigration to build the walls that keep out the rest

[adrianN]

Japan is way overpopulated. In the case that agriculture stops producing as much as it does now and food imports also dry up, Japan will be a very bad place to be. The country is mostly forest and mountain, arable land is rather scarce.

[m_mueller]

There's two main reasons way this doesn't scare me that much:

1) Japan's population is falling and I expect it to have fallen further, maybe to half or two thirds of current, until a global economical collapse.

2) There are ways to heavily increase the land use intensity with modern technology, which I'd expect to happen when the situation gets dicey. The Netherlands are a good example of how this can be done, essentially green houses everywhere. The actual bottleneck is how much energy you have, not the amount of land - Japan has lots of space in the sea for wind and solar energy, plus lots of unused geothermal.

[devmunchies]

I would be interested on more reading on these topics (collapse, human migration, global inequality, defense, survival etc.)

[point78]

Two very expensive countries

[Dove]

Try to help figure out why it's happening. Uninformed activism is unhelpful, and can cause people to ignore informed activism.

[giardini]

It's happening b/c

- so many people don't understand statistics or science and

- some beekeepers in Germany wrote a paper. Here's one of the original papers: https://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Orbrioch%2...

The 75% decline number appears to be from two data points from a 220-acre plot.

- People panic, post it here and everywhere else, presuming that:

- proper scientific methodology was used and

- what applies to a 220-acre plot in the German hinterlands must apply to the whole world.

[deelowe]

Uhh pesticides. Duh!

[QAPereo]

...also habitat loss, destruction of aspects of the overall food chain, Cline change, etc.

[deelowe]

Yeah, I think my sarcasm didn't go over well here.

[anigbrowl]

Yeah hold on while I take 5-10 years out to get a bio degree and publish research so I can start putting out papers saying it's too late and we've passed the point of no return, which will be denied and ignored by the people who are most likely to be causing the problem. Much better than possibly pissing anyone off.

[Dove]

The concern is not pissing people off, exactly. It's crying wolf until the relevant people stop listening. It's drowning out the voices of those who really did spend three decades studying the problem in order to come up with the right answer.

See how almost everyone's reply to the original post has a different recommendation? If they all worked hard to make those things happen, there would be a symphony of screams and no consensus and effective action. It's possible the right answer isn't even in there. It's possible the right answer even is, "Oops, wasn't a problem." When you act in uncertainty you make things worse.

Yes, getting the right answer is hard. It may take a good chunk of a lifetime. If you really want to change the world for the better, though, it's not a step you can skip. Saving the world over lunch while you're young is a fantasy.

[anigbrowl]

By the way, I'm sorry for the snarky tone of my grandparent comment, at which point I was a bit tired and frustrated. But I do think that waiting for the 'right answer' is a bad strategy. Blind action is ineffective, but so is risk aversion.

[anigbrowl]

But you are the relevant people. And just like in business, while it's important to research and plan effectively, if you never take any risks you never get any rewards and the opportunity slips away. Getting involved and taking action isn't going to drown out the voices of research scientists, because while we operate serially as individuals we operate in parallel as a species.

You're never going to persuade everyone. There are people who know how dirty fossil fuels are, how risky pollutants are, and so on. They know that research costs money and that preserving a healthy environment will require major changes - and they don't care. Maybe because they're old and bitter, maybe because they're selfish and figure they'll ride it out while the rest of the world goes to hell, maybe because they have a death wish. You're never going to convert that group, and in fact they'll oppose you every step of teh way because they're assholes. Too bad.

The large mass of uncommitted people in the middle want to be told what to do, and the best way to tell them is to lead by example. You don't have to rush out and start dismantling pipelines, but you do have to do something - whether that's raising awareness, embarrassing a political opponent in public, blocking the loading of chemicals you've decided are especially toxic, establish a weekly neighborhood cleanup crew or whatever.

Carrying on with your own life while waiting for something you can just vote or donate to is not working very well, is it? I don't mean that as a criticism of you, but of the system that purports to offer you environmental policy as a set of consumption choices that you can choose and feel good about. I've been doing recycling and conscious consumption and 1-1 advocacy for maybe 30 years. Those efforts are great, but we're not going to conserve our way out of the problem any more than you can become wealthy by saving a few $ a week. You can outsource it by making donations to organizations you approve of, but let's be honest here, unless you can throw large sums of money at a cause on a rolling basis you might as well be flinging quarters at an oncoming steamroller. Devoting some of your time and labor and investing a bit of your capital if you can is more likely to be effective, because people are primarily motivated by the example of others. And you need to think boldly, or you won't have any impact.

Of course people who are predisposed to study and able to do so should consider academic routes. But we already have lots of highly qualified scientists, while the head of the Environmental Protection Agency likes to do photo opportunities with coal miners to show he's not a creature of the evil science lobby. There is a political conflict here and it needs activists as well as researchers, because just having the correct answer isn't enough.

[Dove]

Doing something is unproductive, and often counterproductive. It is the battle cry of doctors who prescribe unnecessary antibiotics because they cannot hurt and are what patients want, and wind up contributing to the development of antibiotic resistant microbes. It is the philosophy of politicians who make laws for show without solving problems (and often creating problems in the process).

Do not do something. Do something effective.

To suppose that the insect biomass is reduced because of problems with the environment, and that doing good things for the environment will help fix it, is sloppy, superstitious thinking. Will recycling help? Dunno. Will establishing a neighborhood cleanup crew help? Seems unlikely. Will raising awareness help? Only if it serves to better identify the problem or uncover a real solution.

Back when leaded gasoline was poisoning everyone, no amount of recycling, environmental advocacy, neighborhood cleanup, embarrassing politicians, etc., would have helped. The problem had to be understood well enough that people could be persuaded to agree to act in concert to solve it specifically and at great cost. This takes time and study.

Nature is not a moral agent. It will not heal and be kind simply because we act piously toward it. We must understand problems in the specific and fix them in the specific. If you want to help with this insect biomass thing, begin by studying it. Is it really happening? Is it really a problem? What is the cause? Then ask what we can do. Then try to persuade people to do it.

You can't skip steps. It sucks that it takes time and effort, it sucks that you can't just solve everything overnight, but it is the only way to be an agent of effective positive change rather than an agent of chaos.

I am committed to acting vigorously on problems that I know are real, in ways that I am convinced are effective. There is plenty of that to go around!

[anigbrowl]

All true, but the point I'm trying to make (poorly) is that there's more to life than truth-seeking. That's the function of science, but even if science hands you a definitive answer you still need to create the political will to implement it. And it's a fact that there are people who have economic interests in not fixing problems.

I don't care about insect biomass in particular. I care about it as a possibly-wrong indicator of general environmental degradation, of which we have numerous indicators. I also have a possibly-wrong model of the root causes of this and other problems.

You can't skip steps. It sucks that it takes time and effort, it sucks that you can't just solve everything overnight, but it is the only way to be an agent of effective positive change rather than an agent of chaos.

You can't solve everything overnight, but you can lose everything overnight while you're fretting over whether a problem exists or vacillating over its severity or dithering between a multiplicity of unpleasant solutions. An ounce of practice is worth a pound of theory, and my exhortations to act, which will sometimes lead to unproductive or ineffective results, are the product of decades of observation and thought.

I'm sorry that this doesn't lead to a neatly wrapped General Unified Theory of Sustainable Sociopolitical Development - because I too would love to have a verifiable roadmap to a brighter future - but chaos is preferable to predictably circling down into a drain. Overall, I have concluded that the world is getting shittier, that this trend is accelerating, and that the costs of your gradualist approach exceed the benefits.

[elchief]

This is what I've done in the last two years:

- Moved closer to work to minimize driving

- Take the train downtown (on nights out)

- Bike to work on occasion (it's a huge freaking hill)

- Bought programmable thermostats, LED bulbs, vent louvres. Dropped electric use 20%

- Eat organic (helps my IBS), cook at home, buy in bulk, freeze

- Started composting and recycling more. My city has good programs for such

- Ask for paper bags at grocery store, avoid plastics. Use glass storage containers, etc

[jopsen]

- Bring a backpack to the grocery store,

Note, though this won't scale, you need to take political action to make a real change.

[pacifist]

>> this won't scale

Yes it will. If everyone does it that's called scaling.

[anigbrowl]

It helps, but not enough to solve the overarching problem.

[elchief]

Ugh, I hate people that bring their backpack to the grocery. It slows down the packing process a lot. Paper bags are a-okay with me.

[TOGoS]

Join an organization that's doing something to tackle the root of the problem. Socialist Alternative is where I ended up, and I think they're great, but any group that's got a good understanding of the forces shaping the world and has a job for you that you feel is worth doing. Not that that's easy to find through all the noise. I only stumbled across SA because they were speaking at a NoDAPL rally that I happened to go to during a period of relative hopelessness after the election of the orange one.

[JamesBarney]

I would think donating to pro environmental lobbying groups. You be surprised how little large corporations spend on lobbying to influence politicians.

[HisGraceTheDuck]

I do like my humour dry.

[earlyriser]

I'm surprised by what you're saying about the small amount destined to lobbying. Do you have numbers about this?

[stevenwoo]

You have to dig a little, but the average cost for the votes against net neutrality cost about 16,000 per US congressman who voted against it.

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=B

[SapphireSun]

In aggregate, it looks like it's a few billion per year.

https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/

[QAPereo]

Being an earth dwelling human, this seems pretty bad. Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do?

Build a time machine, and instill this sense of dismay, terror, and dawning realization into everyone then.

Barring that, a series of technological miracles would help, but we needed them yesterday.

Don’t have kids.

[anigbrowl]

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.

[kiliantics]

DGR have some really problematic politics when it comes to certain things but there is definitely some good material in there in terms of strategy.

I'd recommend reading earth first! or black and green press for some better politics on a similar wavelength

[ciconia]

Buy a piece of land (a prairie, woodland, marshland, whatever) and either let it sit without touching it, or take action to improve the ecosystem.

[Tharkun]

My grandfather did this. One day he set out to go for a walk in his wee forest, only to discover that all the trees had been stolen. That's pretty much the thing holding me back from buying a small forested plot.

[BeetleB]

>Over the last year, reading the news had made me more passive and worried.

Serious question: Did you only get serious with news reading in the last year or so?

[dleslie]

Plant _local_ pollinating flowers and other plants that the insects rely upon, and encourage everyone you know that can do so to do the same.

[kiliantics]

Google Murray Bookchin

[nathancahill]

This defeatist attitude is terrible. There's so, so much you can personally do, even if you personally can't create change on a global scale a la Bill Gates and co.

[graeme]

They were asking for something proactive, to exit their defeatism. Perhaps you could suggest something.

I suppose reducing spending and food waste is one way an individual can help.

Or for specific problems like insects, if you have a lawn, don’t use pesticides, and cultivate areas of local plants. Grass only lawns aren’t very helpful for insects.

[eric_h]

I had a teacher in high school who frequently cracked a joke that his “ugly” lawn was only ugly because he was prioritizing biodiversity over beauty.

[nathancahill]

The list of things an individual can do to lessen their environmental impact could fill a book, and it's up to the person to determine where they can best act. These ideas are easily googleable, which is why I suggest that changing the attitude from "hole up with food and guns" to "look for ways to be proactive".