Climate/ecological breakdown

Environmentalism
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But even that does not go far enough I believe. Focusing constantly on what’s “wrong” just does not inspire people. Money was invested in railways because people expected to make more money. People got on boats (and still get on boats) because they believe they are heading for a better life.

We can all sit around and wait for mankind to suddenly become altruistic but I don’t think we have long enough. Fear is one motivator but it tends to make humanity stick with what it knows/already does. The doom and gloom stories don’t actually inspire people to get up and do something. I’m not surprised that the wealthiest men on this planet are doing their best to get off it - because that is a positive / inspiring story.

Somehow the story HAS to be made more positive - there are HUGE rewards (financial / quality of life / health) if we really invest in climate/ecology. This is fact.

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Cop26 The Earth Shot Prize

Words worth hearing again…….

“We have every reason to be angry, but I have no time for anger. I want to act. I’m not just a girl from India, I’m a girl from Earth”

“I’m also a student, innovator and environmentalist, and entrepreneur, but most importantly I’m an optimist. Today I ask with all due respect that we stop talking and start doing.”

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A lot of the information seems to come from the green party and unless you have spent time with them fun and enjoyment is never of their agenda. Its sad stories all the way. Oh and an unhealthy dose of superstition and conspiracy.
Sad to say but that how I found them and left.

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@Geof_Cox, it’s very easy to blame capitalism for the all of the planet’s ills but each and everyone of us is just as guilty because of the personal choices we make everyday, we don’t have to wait for governments to act we choose to as Sue has suggested.

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Is there data on how environmentally friendly communist countries were/are?

Given that areas of Russia are uninhabitable for the next 1,000 years due to leaks and accidents at NBC weapons factories, I’m guessing the answer is “not in the slightest”.

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I think these last posts from @tim17 and @NotALot exemplify further aspects to the problem:

  1. The idea that governments, businesses, etc, can’t/won’t/shouldn’t do anything much because it’s individuals that caused the problem and it’s down to them to sort it out by individual actions. This is close to the naive (and indeed demonstrably false) argument that everyone in a market has perfect information, that advertising, for example, merely informs, and millions of people therefore choose freely to consume things that will actually kill them.
  2. Pointing out the capitalism is central to the problem elicits in the cold-war mentality the idea that the alternative of ‘communism’ is being proposed. But in reality there are many different ways of organising societies that do not fit this simplistic schema. The ‘capitalism’ of France - a highly regulated economy which is in fact more than 50% state-controlled, is as different from that of the US as the ‘communism’ of China or the former Yugoslavia were from the Soviet Union. (And there are of course many other entirely different ways of organising societies that nobody would dream of trying to fit into cold-war era ideology.)

What I believe we need to do is look across the world and across history as objectively as possible - consciously ditching the ideological blinkers of the past - for what actually works and is sustainable.

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Yep - excellent example. What bosses mean by ‘change management’ is change within what Kuhn calls the paradigm: ie. they want human beings to adapt to the ways technology, etc, is changing markets, but not to think about changing the way we conceive of business or markets to adapt them more to human beings!

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You’ve totally misread or misunderstood what I’ve said. Unlike whether smoking kills or eating junk food leads to diabetes it’s got nothing to do with advertising or having the right information, we have all been affected in some way by climate change so can see for ourselves the damage we have done to the planet and therefore can all start to change the way we live before waiting for governments to tell us what we need to do.

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Hmmm… Not so sure I misunderstood Tim. While I agree with the last part of your last post - that people are now informed about environmental breakdown and can do some things to mitigate it themselves, in your earlier post this point was framed by a contrast against the idea that its easy to blame capitalism.

But it isn’t! Blaming capitalism is the very last thing we’re being encouraged to do! We’re always being told to do this or do that - get an electric car, eat less meat, etc, etc - but when did you last see the main stream media (with honourable exceptions like Monbiot) really talk about the fundamental economic facts in this discussion - like the fact that capitalism incentivises increasing consumption, but really we need to incentivise reducing consumption, or that the whole private bank/financial system will collapse without economic growth, but we do in fact need to reverse growth.

Yet I think it’s precisely here that the optimistic message - that @SuePJ rightly calls for - lies: ending ‘the consumer society’, ditching the idea that the latest gadget or dress or market-mediated ‘memory’ can make us happy, shifting the focus from status symbols and ‘retail therapy’ to what really makes life worth living: the natural world, our communities and relationships, healthy bodies, meaningful work, and so on.

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Delighted to read this important thread here on SF, with so many insightful and valid comments.

Interestingly, there’s no mention - either in this discussion or in George Monbiot’s otherwise excellent article - of the elephant in the room: the sheer number of humans on the planet as even a contributory factor to climate/ecological breakdown, let alone as the root cause of our woes and the main bar to successful implementation of known solutions.

We need to stop feeding the profit machine and shift to degrowth, sustainability and environmental accountability. But we’re made to fear what will happen if we do so. We’re waiting for approval, action and leadership from those who have the most to gain by maintaining the status quo. And therein lies the fundamental flaw. I fear that nothing will happen until we’re all forced to remove our blinkers… and that may well be too late.

It was claustrophobia and ubiquitous concrete that compelled me to leave England. I realised that the homeland I’d always loved had become a sterile grey dystopia, full of uncaring people and new housing developments. As well as escaping to a wild green corner of France, I wrote a book in an effort to raise awareness and stimulate debate, and realised a lifelong ambition by managing to find a publisher who loved it. My novel is called 10:59 and it explores a lot of this stuff in an entertaining and accessible way, suitable for teenage readers as well as adults. Oh, and it features a global pandemic, despite having been written 2 years before COVID happened. If you’re curious, you can read the opening chapters free, and the book’s discounted to 99p on Amazon for the duration of COP26.

This post has turned into a bit of a plug for my book, but it’s so directly relevant to this discussion that it would have been remiss of me not to mention it :wink: and it’s getting amazing reviews and ratings. I’d be especially thrilled to hear feedback from any fellow SF-ers who fancy a read!

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So true!

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This clip contains profanity so if you are easily offended please dont watch. It also contains some swearing!

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Hi Niki - welcome back to Survive France (my feed said you hadn’t posted for 2 years) - and thanks for the links to your book.

I share your fear that most of our ‘leaders’ - who gained their positions precisely through working with the status quo - will not be capable of leading us out of the mess we’re in. Or indeed really seeing the mess.

I disagree on the importance of population. There is actually a Guardian article today that points away from this, to the real problem:

A previous Oxfam study concluded that the world’s richest 10% produce half of carbon emissions, while poorest half of the world’s population - 3.5 billion people - account for just 10%.
Moreover, the main drivers of population growth are in fact poverty and poor education. Population excluding immigration is falling - too fast actually - throughout the developed world. But both poverty and poor education are easily soluble problems if the wasteful wealth of the main polluters were to be spread more evenly - so the answer to both over-consumption and population growth is the same: greater equality.

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Would you include China, India and Russia in that category?

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It’s the wealthy that represent the biggest problem - wherever they are…

image

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Thanks Geof. 2 years since my last post on SF? Wow. Time flies when you’re trying to renovate an old house! When (if) I ever finish making windows, laying floorboards, etc., I’ll look forward to being a more regular contributor…

I agree that very few people - world leaders or otherwise - really see the mess. There are none so blind… and all that. The conspiracy theorist in me says that those with influence and money have tried hard to sweep the mess under the carpet and we’re not supposed to see it, although it’s starting to poke out around the edges more and more these days.

We may have to agree to disagree regarding population, as my research and observations have convinced me that its importance and relevance can’t be overstated. Your comments about rich and poor are entirely valid, of course, as are those about addressing poverty and education. But we’re not just talking about carbon emissions or climate (although, heaven knows, those are big enough topics on their own). As you said in one of your earlier posts, we must “take in the whole picture of climate and ecological breakdown”.

As soon as you start investigating the bigger picture, of which carbon emissions and climate are a part, you cannot help seeing the impact of overpopulation everywhere. Consider the amount of waste and pollution we generate, the inexorable expansion of our towns and cities, the increasing demand for food production and energy, our destruction of habitats and other species, etc., etc. Our infrastructure and systems are creaking under the weight of almost 8 billion humans and we see the effects every day in traffic queues, waiting times for medical treatment, spiralling allergies and mental health issues, civil unrest…

We’ve all seen the statistics that the world has already lost 85% of its forests and 95% of its wildlife, and we know that the states of our oceans, ice caps, pollinators and weather patterns are on the brink of irreversible tipping points. All of this is a result of human activity. If any other species on Earth was having such devastating effects, we’d have taken action to reduce their numbers long ago.

If we don’t take some pretty rapid steps to bring our population back into balance with the natural world and the sustainable carrying capacity of our planet, something’s gotta give. And it won’t be pretty when our failure to acknowledge this comes back to bite us in the derrière.

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Not sure that my generation should take the blame for the current state of the planet, the following might explain why :grin:

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Totally agree. We also know that scientists aren’t infallible: butter is bad for you - oh actually no it isn’t. Also scientists are sometimes in the pay of big business - diesel scandal for example. Also agree about population - read Michael Crichton’s book State of Fear. Shame he isn’t still around to ask if he’s changed his mind.

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I agree it would be better if there were fewer people on the planet - that’s not my argument.
This is my argument:

  1. Focusing on population is a distraction from the real problem, which is over-consumption. Actually there is an even higher association of forms of environmental damage apart from greenhouse gas emissions with the relatively wealthy - but of course they want to focus on population because it lets them off the hook - they can say to themselves: ‘OK, I have 2 houses, fly somewhere every other week, and eat meat nearly every day, but only have 2 children, so I’m alright’.
  2. In any case, the remedy is the same: redistribution of wealth. People have large families when they don’t have social security - eg. if you have little chance of improving your income, little pension provision, and perhaps high child mortality, having a lot of children night well be your only way of providing for your old age. All the evidence is that if you give people security, the birth rate will fall below equilibrium, and the population will fall.

In any case, what alternative is there? Saying to future generations ‘We’ve ruined the planet, so now you can only have one child.’ That’s just another way of passing the buck, isn’t it?

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Of course it’s true that living sustainably will mean returning to many of the practices (and the economics) that some of us experienced before the 1970s. But it’s absurd, isn’t it, to blame people born in subsequent decades for the lifestyles they were born into?
It is, precisely, the oldies that fucked up the planet - now to make matters worse, they don’t even have the honesty or courage to own it, and want future generations not only to pick up the pieces, but to take blame as well!

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