Agreed. We simply have been functioning off the premise that what we do has no impact. But we are in the billions now and most of what we do we do at a huge and unimaginable scale.
Nature could, before, take time to heal and "absorb" everything we threw it's way. Time was the ultimate healer.
We no longer have that option and we simply must stop the third world from progressing. If you all thought it was bad with the small 1st world population damaging the env, you can't even fathom the scale and sheer trash the third world billions will generate in the coming decades whilst they "come out of poverty and industrialization".
All the more reason why we should be uplifting the third world. Instead of allowing them to proliferate their own suffering using debt and population booms.
Wouldn't that be imposing cultural values of the first world on developing countries?
What makes us sure that modernity as it is now is that much better? I'm not entirely convinced that is the case, and there are many problems that result from problems inherent to modernity.
Given the mental health crises in the first world from our youth, I think the first world is far, far from figuring everything out, including problems with suffering.
As far as debt, isn't that a first world problem saddled onto the third world?
Finally, as a thought experiment, if an alien species from outer space came down here and wanted to uplift America, would Americans want it? I bet you, people would not take it well. There's a presumption of cultural and technological superiority that will chafe everyone. I've seen memes comparing Star Trek as an ideal of where we can go as a civilization, and yet, Star Trek also talks about the Prime Directive, not uplifting ... unless violating it generate enough drama to have an interesting plot.
This doesn't correlate with my lived experience. I remember almost everything except yogurt and milk coming in glass containers. My family and friends strongly preferred soda from bottles than cans, and we were lower middle class and we didn't use plastic 2 liters very often. (And several families drank raw milk - I know, the horror).
Nearly the entire condiments aisle is now filled with soybean oil where it nearly didn't exist before. And it was a really big deal when McDonald's went away from using animal fat to cook fries in. Now pretty much nothing is cooked in oil from animal fat. This is certainly a change from pretty much the entire history of human food.
Various researchers are pointing out that glyphosate covers nearly the entire surface of the Earth and is found in nearly everything, including clothing and linens. It was not nearly as widespread in the '70s and '80s.
Exposure to various radio and now microwave (5G) frequencies was practically zero compared to what we began being exposed to in the '90s and is now pretty much everywhere.
Personally, I draw the major distinctions in video game technologies with the PlayStation and another later with Xbox Live! (the latter was really most popular with the Xbox 360). Previous technologies we would fairly quickly hit a point where it just got boring so we would go outside and play, most especially pre-NES. While more of a behavior factor, it is very important on pretty much every level except diet that we engaged in physical activity, social interaction, and sunlight.
As a side note, when I've tried to research it I've found that Gen X is experiencing a higher mortality rate than previous generations in pretty much every category. This correlates with my lived experience.
Glyphosate is far less harmful than any herbicide that was in use before it. That’s why researchers have such a hard time linking it to diseases except in farmers who spray literal metric tons of the stuff. But glyphosate is a red herring - the real nasty shit that is harmful are not herbicides, but pesticides. And what was in use in 70s and 80s is nightmare fuel.
That "nasty shit" wasn't in my sheets and underwear and didn't coat the surface of the Earth. The issues related to claims can be equally attributed to the massive funding of even journals, themselves, plus a nearly unlimited budget to fight everything in courts and out-of-court settlements with gag orders - nearly every dirty trick a corporation can do has been done to protect the producers of glyphosate.
Something that has become clear to me over the years is that when we go one by one through all of the things that were not present in my youth, it is impossible that any of these things could be a cause of anything bad because the scientifically literate people tell me so.
Yet, here we are, with each generation following the Baby Boomers seeing higher mortality (and many other negative medical condition) rates than the previous generations. I guess it's just something else that we can't detect.
I think the ultimate lesson will be "we're one with the environment, not, in fact, a separate entity from it".