I have not done any rebel rousing or demonstrating for nearly 2 years. I just didn't really care about anything any more. Our local paper had become a mockery of actual journalism and I seemed to be surrounded by the economy-is-king types. I was tired.
On my way home from the theatre last evening, though, I caught the provincial news on the CBC. There was a story about a plastic bag manufacturer trying to overturn a plastic bag ban in Victoria. Obviously, the manufacturer wants to save its livelihood. Immediately after this article, though, was an article on ocean plastic. A little later in the evening, I heard something about an estimate of when there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean.
If we ever stop privileging the economy over the environment, we will have to come to terms with the fact that some jobs are going to have to stop. I don't think we have it in us.
I don't know why it's so difficult for people to understand that for an economy, or a political system, or much of anything at all to exist, it's sort of a prerequisite to have an environment for it to exist in. Humans have been placing themselves above the environment for millennia; the practice is only getting stronger. We outsource every externality, so we don't have to live with the pollution that is the inevitable byproduct of the consumerist lifestyle, and we don't EVER think in terms of whole systems. We only see the relatively minuscule amount of power our phones draw, for instance, without considering the server farms that drive what appears on those phones. Each farm goes through enough electricity to power a small city, and then are thousands of them.
ReplyDelete...and now I'm depressed.
Sorry to depress you Ken. I think about this stuff a lot. I think it is the prime reason for my own depression. I try really hard to lessen my impact, but there are conundrums to that. I live in the north, which means I have to heat my home for half the year. My choices for this are oil, gas, wood or electricity and none are without their issues. So if I move south to a place where warming my home is not necessary, I contribute to areas of overpopulation and probably have cooling issues. Just one of all the many problems of living.
Deleteoh, Karen, don't be sorry. You didn't depress me, I did that all by myself. And I understand your point. Some people would suggest that since we contribute less than 2% of greenhouse gas emissions, anything we do is pointless. I'm NOT one of those people. We do what we can, within reason. We hope to be off the grid in five or ten years....
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