Why? One would probably tend to keep the impact tolerable enough for themself, but you're not going to find enough people except green fanatics to be motivated to minimize it.
Because the impact is difficult to appreciate at a personal level over the short (years to decades) timeframe. As a result, individual humans struggle to realise it in their daily interactions. Nevertheless, the damage accumulates and causes significant negative results for future generations.
Your logic assumes a feedback loop that shows the person the results of their actions. Like the Crypto article yesterday [1] touched on, if you lack that feedback loop you won't know the negative consequences of your actions.
We owe it to our offspring that we leave them with an environment that's not beyond recovery from the actions we take by the time they're in a position to affect change. Anything else is purely selfish.
To put it in the Hacker News analogy, if I corrupt one bit of your system's RAM, you'll rarely notice the effects and will probably use your PC for its functional life without realising your RAM even has a fault. If I corrupt a significant percentage of it, you'll be crying murder when you get hourly system crashes.
Your logic assumes a feedback loop that shows the person the results of their actions. Like the Crypto article yesterday [1] touched on, if you lack that feedback loop you won't know the negative consequences of your actions.
We owe it to our offspring that we leave them with an environment that's not beyond recovery from the actions we take by the time they're in a position to affect change. Anything else is purely selfish.
To put it in the Hacker News analogy, if I corrupt one bit of your system's RAM, you'll rarely notice the effects and will probably use your PC for its functional life without realising your RAM even has a fault. If I corrupt a significant percentage of it, you'll be crying murder when you get hourly system crashes.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775165