I wouldn't call myself an environmentalist, but I do the small things that I can. Reuse what I can, recycle what I can. I have lawn areas but plenty of insect-friendly stuff elsewhere, and I use a push-along mower and a weeding knife to maintain it. Electric scarifier once a year because I'm not up to doing it by hand. I have a car but I don't drive around just for fun, and car-share with friends for trips out such as garden visits (or at least I did, pre-covid). Air travel only when I have to for work, and I use the train if it's competitive in terms of work time but realistically that's only Brussels. I'm hoping that clients will be happy to continue using Zoom, Webex etc instead, now that they've been forced to get used to it. And in terms of world population, I've chosen not to have children, which, now that I think about it, is probably the biggest contribution.
Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Soil type: sandy, well-drained
Is it too late? Are we just too selfish as a race, to deserve to live on this planet? Would the rest of the creatures / plants etc be better off without us?
I think that all species that are or have been on the planet do exactly what we do as a species. They try to survive and thrive. They do everything in their power to ensure their species survives and grows. The only problem with man is his brain and his ability to modify his environment to suit him and that he has made and used tools to help in that survival. As a species, mankind has been exceedingly successful. Too successful? We all applaud the use of medecine to stop man dying, but don't then see the other human developments as also being responsible for man's success. Would man be where he is total without plastic - how would a vaccination program work if all plastic was taken out of the chain? And if man hadn't travelled and had the urge to spread... and without 'power' fine, the air may be cleaner, but would you have food lasting beyond it's normal life and the ability to feed billions? Man just stumbles from one problem to the next - unintentionally. From manure mountains in Victorian cities from too many horses, to pollution from fossil fuel cars - to what?...what to do with 'n' billion spent car batteries containing heavy metals? It's not intentional - just no forethought - or even with forethought - the thought appears to be down the lines of what the effect is on 'man'. Man is only cleaning up the planet because otherwise it will affect man's ability to thrive. But man is just another species doing what all species do.
Instead of calling ourselves Environmentalists, what about "Conservationally Aware, I think most of us (on here) are trying to do our bit. Reading any article by Chris Van Tulleken,Virologist,Horizon Thursday 9pm BBC2, says, basically the more we mess with the planets' ecosystem,global consumption,climate change,health inequalities,agricultural practices, we are awaiting far worse pandemics, there are more than a million viruses in animals able to infect us.I enjoyed your post Steve Tu. you are correct and of course, even 150 years ago, there were so many viruses and bacteria which we have now eridicated, more will come along, keep man on his toes.
The insanity of all this is that we are only here to moan about the abuse of the environment by man - because of the abuse of the environment by man. Isn't that ironic? Without man's modifications - from fire, to discovering new fuels and power sources to.....what and where would we be?
Take those effects out of your family tree and would your ancestors have died or never even met? More than likely - from cold, from illness, from eating crap food .... from not having vaccines, from having polluted water....from not being able to travel more than 20 miles in a day...
So, fine, man is/has made mistakes - but that's with hindsight - was the car a mistake at the time when London had mountains of horse manure and dead horses to contend with?. I'm not sure I know of any invention/discovery by man that was known to be an issue when invented/discovered and we just pressed on.
OK - the issues exist - and more will in the future. Fix the issues as they're known and try to think about the future more now - but this beating up of generations is just bonkers.
...and I repeat pansy, when the car was invented, no one thought there'd be billions of them - they were 'invented' to cause an issue, but they did help to solve one - look at population growth since 1900 - and wealth growth in the west. No one mentions what will happen with billions of heavy metal batteries - so are we just moving from one issue to another? Who knows? Who knows if the wind farms generate sub surface sonics that bugger up fish communication? Anyone know? But man doesn't look to future problems - we see that with antibiotics don't we?
Course, people eat more crap now, I have seen History programme recently which said the wartime rations was the best diet, for health, hardly any diabetics or heart disease, people were smaller,weighed less, more physical excercise
Just heard a relevant discussion piece on the radio this morning where an emeritus professor from the local university was highlighting the emerging issue of human population decline and referenced a paper from the Lancet journal that had found that a lot of developed countries now were producing insufficient children to replace the numbers reaching death and the trend in the developing nations of the planet was for their populations that are continuing to grow currently to also be in decline in the not so distant future. One line form the paper reads:
" In the reference scenario, the global population was projected to peak
in 2064 at 9·73 billion (8·84–10·9) people and decline to 8·79 billion
(6·83–11·8) in 2100."
I had heard that Japan and Germany were in this situation but not known of the growing trend for other countries to follow the same pattern. Now I know I have just gone off on a tangent but just thought it was worth mentioning this, as for me I think this raises the possibility that people could co exist with some amount of the natural world intact, once we continue to try to resolve the damage to the environment we have been doing since the human population has reached the multi billion levels and develop cleaner technologies to meet our needs. Is it possible to be a positive environmentalist?
Apropos of @robairdmacraignil ‘s commentary, I read quite recently that Europe will reach peak population in the next couple of years. By 2100 the population of Spain, Poland, Italy, Japan, S Korea and various others will halve. UK’s population will plateau at about 70 million through the rest of this century. One of the most dramatic figures, given the impact it is likely to have on consumerism, is the decline in China’s working age population from around 940 million today to 340 million by 2100.
I am not trying to be any form of apologist for man's impact on the planet, but you have to be aware of the massive, MASSIVE change in population worldwide over the past 150 years. I don't think man has intentionally tried to b***er up the planet, but when the population leaps the way it has, any issues in man's actions are just magnified proprtionately.
Older generations going back through time weren't any more 'green' intentionally - they used whatever technology they had - the same as we do - their technological advances were just so much slower. The pain in the bum is that the increase in population is presumably linked to man's technological advances - so it's a catch 22.
As an aside, the population thing also made me admire the 'ancients' even more - we tend to look back with today's eyes. But imagine going back to when Stonehenge was built or the Pyramids and just imagine what a colossal effort that was with:
1) the population at the time - hardly more than two or three major cities today - but spread over the face of the planet.
2) how that population was so, so tied to nature and producing food just to keep themselves alive
Why use so much of the available workforce on a 'glory' project? Amazing though eh?
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