| Not the OP, but I'll take your questionnaire > So this is how you justify it to yourself? I don't justify anything. In my opinion, a first world life as it exists today is unjustifiable. But that doesn't mean it's my fault, or that I can do anything about it. > It seems you acknowledge the legitimacy and urgency of the problem but are unwilling to make changes due to it being social suicide? It would be impossible for me personally to make meaningful changes. I live in a city with no infrastructure. The USA has so much inefficiency baked into its supply chain due to globalism it's ridiculous. Everyone is anti-nuclear, no politician represents me or these interests. I recycle, I carry my own bag to the store, etc. I drive more than an hour every day even though I would like to not own a car. I can't ever not be employed because losing the insurance would literally kill me due to a medical condition. > Do you have kids? I will probably never have children because I don't really believe in the future. > Will you be able to tell them you did something positive about this problem? Or greedily stayed complicit due to the inconvenience? Are you prepared to tell your daughter you were the part of the people killing all the wildlife on earth? Here's the deal. All of our carbon footprints here probably suck, but you're playing into the hands of the real evil by framing things this way. Counterintuitively, pushing for individual responsibility for pollution and environmental degradation is exactly what big corporations want because it enables their destruction more than any other single thing. If I had a child, I would educate them not to make this argument but to push for structural reform and deprogramming of this mindset. Have you ever heard of the Keep America Beautiful [1] campaign? It's where a lot of this sentiment comes from, and it was funded by Coca-Cola in response to a rise in sentiment supporting legislation to reign in environmental destruction on the part of big corporations. Greenwashing campaigns have been very effective at shifting public attention away from corporate responsibility and towards the individual. I'll 'do my part' to consume less, but I refuse to put responsibility for these corporate / government structures on myself. Especially after they've gone to such lengths to gaslight us all. > This stuff goes through my head for myself, so I'm curious how you address it? One thing I've brainstormed with a similarly-concerned friend would be to create a series of localized handout materials tying politicians that people in the area can vote for to specific environmental atrocities directly in an easy-to-understand fashion. That would be a pretty non-trivial effort though, would require cooperation from a lot of other people, and could get us in a lot of trouble. Maybe one day. [1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful) |