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by blamazon
1278 days ago
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Fair point on the posted laundry basket being a win. But it is undeniable that it's so inexpensive because of all the plastic that was disposed. We also didn't see all the identical laundry baskets that went straight into landfill. I do understand real life landfills aren't like Wall-E, but in that film they certainly didn't run out of landfill space and it wasn't a utopia. On the second point, I don't find it too convincing that I don't have to worry about plastics in my blood, my children's blood, their children's blood, because we don't understand it very well yet. And on the ocean plastic, that's just the tip of the iceberg that we can see and talk about easily. The real thing that's killing ecosystems en masse is not at the output end of the system, but on the input end. Global reliance on petrochemicals, industrial pesticides derived thereby, etc. I'm a scuba diver and I've watched reefs die with my own eyes. I just can't shake the feeling we are on course to strip the planet of billions of years of biodiversity and in 1000 years whoever is left will regard the decisions of our time w.r.t. resource extraction as catastrophically stupid. But I do acknowledge how this is idealogical and emotionally based as you point out, and I can agree to disagree. My friends tell me: we won't be alive in 1000 years, so who cares? That doesn't sit well with me, but I get it. Edit: noticed your edit and agree a lot with that point! |
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About 300 years ago Europe was mostly stripped bare of forests. It helped us get to the point where we can say “Wow that was stupid”.
Now we use forests less (thanks to coal and later oil) and Europe is regrowing most of them. Yes ecosystems were impacted and biodiversity changed … now it’s slowly coming back. On the scale of millions of years this event is largely invisible.
> As a result, during the period 1750-1850 forests in Central Europe had been decimated, causing a serious lack of timber. Some contemporary reports even spoke partly of desert-like landscapes at that time. During the late 19th and 20th centuries a huge amount of artificial reforestation was implemented.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_forest_in_Cen...
> The area of forest in the EU increased by almost 10 % in 1990–2020; with the largest relative increase in Ireland (by 69 %) and largest absolute increase in Spain (by 4.7 million ha). Estimated 63 % of the net annual increment of timber in EU forests was logged in 2019
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...