To feel like it’s too late to stop environmental disaster?

[greatandpowerfulozma]

Just that really. I feel like people won’t change in time to stop it. Meh.

*The planet will be fine

Humans may cause their own extinction, lots of other species will be extinct, but the planet will continue to turn, and new species will develop, and nature will grow back over the ravages left by human destruction.*

He is not wrong.
Planet has circle of heat and cold. Regular ice ages. We are speeding the process massively. Once humans are not here, planet will eventually reset to something and as he says, new animals and other life forms will evolve.

What really bugs me that us as individuals can do as much as we can, but until something changes in certain countries, we are fucked anuway. 90%+ of plastic in oceans comes from the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; the Nile and the Niger. So realitively small region, compare to the rest of the world, creates the biggest problem. Same regions are predominantly the highest air polluters.
Kind of makes me feel resigned a bit tbh. Even if whole EU stops everything, we equal just to less than half of population of india or china.
I feel like that's where officials should be really trying to send a message at this point. We get it. Looks like small part of the world doesn't and yet creates the most.

Surely deforestation has had one of the biggest impacts.
I know we could all do more on a global scale but losing 1.3 million sq km of forests in the last 30 years must have had a huge impact on climate.

InspectorClouseauMNdivision, yes, exactly that.

But we, in the West, have had our cake and eaten it (traveling, gap year travel, cars, heating, airco, luxuries) and now developing countries want what we've had for decades.... they won't let us dictate them, I don't think

There was a thread about the Extinction protesters and one poster commented on how hypocritical some of the protesters were with their plastic bottles and leaving litter.
Another poster replied that a little bit of hypocrisy doesn’t matter so long as the message is being got across.
So how much hypocrisy ‘doesn’t matter’?
Is it fine for Emma Thompson to fly all the way from US just to join the protesters?
Is it fine for Ed Miliband to rack up huge air miles?

That is for the individual to decide...

I have a friend who lectures/preaches about the environment on social media on a daily basis.... she's just traveled around SE Asia and NZ

Her posts are not getting many "likes"

Lots of people are just kidding themselves, and lots of protesters I know are also mad keen on travel, have 2 cars, etc etc.

Do as I say, don't do as I do

In my view it damages the credibility of the protest/activism

So many people having three or more children but then boosting that they don’t count because they recycle and are raising such ‘environmentally aware little citizens’. If they grow up to live a typical western lifestyle it’s still causing massive damage no matter how much they recycle.

Even if everyone only replaces themselves advances in medicine allowing people to live longer will still mean the population will still increase, at least in the short term.

I’m no saint. I own a car, travel long or medium haul most years and eat meat but I’m trying really hard to consume less and make a difference where I can.

Yep.

Might as well have a Galapagos Turtle for breakfast and be done with it.

I get what you're saying @Solitude, but I'd rather people were a bit hypocritical while trying to effect change than fully not giving a shit and doing neither, like some of the people on this thread. If people had to be perfect before they try to make change then no one would bother.

I get why people are angry at the Emma Thompson thing but she raised a huge amount of awareness and has to travel for her work.

We have stopped holidaying abroad, we've stopped eating almost all animal products and try to buy local food, asked people not to buy us Christmas and birthday presents, and have massively cut down on our general consumption of things (clothes, furniture, tech etc second hand and only if absolutely needed). Plus the usual recycling, refilling, avoiding SUPs etc. BUT at the moment we still run two cars, still eat avocadoes and still shop at supermarkets most weeks. When is someone "allowed" to be part of the movement?

I think we're probably teetering on the brink and if people don't change now, and I mean now not in five years then it will be too late.

I could feel guilty because I had four children but that's pointless. My daughter has already decided she will not have any children herself because she understands the environmental impact each new human has. She stopped eating meat and will go fully dairy free when she's not a poor student, she has also not learnt to drive and has no intention of doing so, she takes public transport everywhere. So actually I have managed to raise at least one human who is fully on board.

I will admit that I have 3 children but Dsis never wanted children so I borrowed one of hers.

I get why people are angry at the Emma Thompson thing but she raised a huge amount of awareness and has to travel for her work.
I thought the protesters said flying should be for emergencies only. Why couldn’t Emma Thompson have done a video link?

I think everyone should calm down. By the time things got rough we would probably build our ozone layer and live in domed cities. We would also probably be moving on to other planets. I'm guessing this would be in another 100+ years.

I do all of those things, listed 1-5
in a post above, not for green reasons in the first place to be fair, mostly because they’re cheaper and I’m fearful of flying now, since the children were born, so go everywhere by Eurostar which I read is better.
The thing in the list that worries me most is clothing: people’s attitudes to it are horrific, but something, wear it once or twice, chuck it out. The pollution the production of these cheap clothes causes is horrific. I believe they're even called disposable garments in the industry.
When I was a kid we were bought something, wore it, seemingly forever , until it was practically threadbare, when it would be given to a younger sibling to play in them mum would eventually turn it into dusters or tea towels. Not suggesting we have to go that far but anyone who wears something a few times then chucks it in the bin just has to stop.
Food waste is also an huge problem born. Tony Juniper was saying this morning that we waste a complete third of our food.

Population growth for me is the scariest issue,

200 years ago there were less than one billion humans living on earth. Today, according to UN calculations there are over 7 billion of us.1 Recent estimates suggest that today's population size is roughly equivalent to 6.9% of the total number of people ever born.2 This is the most conspicuous fact about world population growth: for thousands of years, the population grew only slowly but in recent centuries, it has jumped dramatically. Between 1900 and 2000, the increase in world population was three times greater than during the entire previous history of humanity—an increase from 1.5 to 6.1 billion in just 100 years.

ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth

This issue has been in our media for several years, i remember learning about it in school 30 years ago and yet people are still having more than two children per couple

noholidays it's escaped your notice then that things have got pretty rough for large sections of the planet already then? Rainforests, wetlands, coral reefs not to mention all the weather patterns? Who the hell wants to live in a domed city?

In fact your post has to be a wind up, moving onto other planets ffs???

I don't think anyone would choose to live in such conditions but I don't realistically think we can control what other humans do or how big families are on other parts of the planet (the more populous areas of the Americas, Asia, and Africa). Considering how much we have progressed in the last 100 years (cars, airplanes, internet, mobile phones, etc), I don't think it's that far fetched to believe we will achieve unimaginable things in another 100 years.

@nanbread (as you quoted me)

the whole western world is built on a pyramid of "consumption". The reason they fixed the crash of a few years ago by spewing money into the system was to maintain consumption. They want, and need people to spend. To buy cars, mobile phones, computers, TVs , holidays, meals out and so on. To go to university and run up bills. If people stop spending then millions of workers will be out of work.

If the spending roundabout stops, then most people's living standards will drop. Some won't, because there are always some rich privileged people.

I am aghast (that's the wrong word - the right word is exasperated) to hear so many people talking about children in poverty. There should be no children in poverty in this country. If there are, it's because their parents don't deserve to have children, and not because of inherent problems in society. There was real poverty in the past in this country, but not so much in the last 40 years. It really is insulting to 3rd world peoples to complain about poverty in the west.

The end result of extinction rebellion will be to reduce us all to agrarian subsistence levels.

This thread, AIBU "to feel like it's too late to stop environmental disaster" is just crazy.

like @solitudeataltitude just posted. The earth is not dying. It's just evolving.

Read some dystopian fiction, it's not a pretty outlook

We are far too selfish to survive. 20 years ago as a student i was a passionate environmentalist. Several fellow students openly admittee that they were not prepared to change their lifestyle and that it was inevitable that humans would die out.
I mean if students cannot be arsed to change then what hope is there for anyone else?
People wont give up their cars or meat either.

Admit..

Gth1234 I know what you’re saying. We’ve all become (me included) far too happy in our comfy consumer lifestyles to ever give them up to save the planet. I will admit I’d be gutted not to fly, drive, or drink the lovely Australian merlot I had the other day on my comfy sofa while watching game of thrones in my heated home.

I guess I’m saying the penny has dropped for me with all this newspaper coverage etc. We’re fucked. Really stuffed. No one seems to care though but I feel like even if we did care there would be some pretty uncomfortable things we’d have to do at this point to stop the extinction of the natural world. I’m rambling again.

When I was a kid we were bought something, wore it, seemingly forever grin, until it was practically threadbare,
This.
My niece threw away a skirt the other day because the hem had come down.

When I think of my children suffering or their children. Not having the opportunities we have etc I get so low and hopeless. I actually can't function. So I have to switch off from this apocalyptic thinking

But why is always just about how it will affect our children and grandchildren? What about all the animals, plants, forests, rivers? Our earth is so stunningly beautiful and what we are doing to it is utter desecration.