To think that people are waking up?

[1980Gal]

Something has changed in me. I can't stop thinking about how everything I do affects the environment. Is it just me or have others experienced a real shift in thinking and feeling? Yes there are loads of people who have already been especially conscious of these things, and I'm sure most of us do the obvious like recycling where possible, but this feels different. DH feels the same, like something has 'clicked'. Last week he said he's only going to eat red meat once a month due to environmental impact - very out of character. I keep thinking of Greta T travelling for days/weeks by boat when a flight would have got her there in hours. Are others feeling the same? Do you think something might be happening nationally to people's mindsets? Is there now more hope than ever that we might just not f**k up the world?

“The trouble is that people have no idea how to live the 1960s lifestyle that scaling back requires.”

I don’t understand this sort of sweeping statement. What 1960s lifestyle? Cherry picking some idillic good life with allotments and hessian bags whilst ignoring the pollution, chemical use and poverty that came with that time?

What’s the point in looking back? We all know none of us are going to give up our iPhones, our WiFi, our computers and electric cars. None of us are going back to sharing a bed with our parents and assorted siblings. None of us are going back to slum living in the inner city and high infant mortality rates. Why not look forward and use all the technology and knowledge we’ve gained in the last 60 years?

FWIW this fetishising of Greta Thunberg is something that confuses me too

To borrow Jillyhilly's religious analogy again, I get that folk want a messiah figure to hang this on, but is such a clearly troubled young lass really the best person for it?

Greta is a pain in the neck, quite honestly.

Oh and if climate change was as important as it's meant to be, the advocates of us all wearing hair shirts would actually have an argument for it, rather than "if you don't change your ways, Autistic Pippi Longstocking will cry and be angry".

The insertion of the ghastly, vile, Greta Thunberg into things is the worst thing climate advocates could do. I recycle my bottles and paper but I will happily throw them into the Thames every time I see that aggressive, immature, child demand democratically-elected politicians do this and that just because she commands it to be so.

Grow up and nuke China if you want anything doing.

We need to stop building all over the countryside, decimating forests and world wide population decrease but that won’t happen, the human race is full of self importance and destroy’s other species 😞

We did have the Summer of Love and the Beatles in the 60s. Wasn't all doom and gloom

The insertion of the ghastly, vile, Greta Thunberg into things is the worst thing climate advocates could do.

What an odd thing to say. Why can a 16 year old girl be so ghastly and vile?

Grow the fuck up, wokesters! I like this expression, nice one.

You certainly have a spirited turn of phrase @Kazooboohoo. Can’t quite agree with nuking China but do agree that the climate/environmental issue is a massively complicated, virtually irresolvable problem with China somewhere near the centre of it. And that a few little British people watching David Attenborough and worrying about their meat-eating habits and whether or not to buy a bamboo cup is completely irrelevant. Crack on, though.

I get that folk want a messiah figure to hang this on, but is such a clearly troubled young lass really the best person for it?

Yes, this is my problem with Greta T and the people around her - a vulnerable autistic child who suffers from depression, anxiety, anorexia and selective mutism should not be in this position. She shouldn’t be lauded by politicians. And she certainly should not be encouraging other young people to panic. It’s sad and ridiculous.

New clothes every season?
Throw clothes out?
Flying?
Eating red meat?
Lots of things make a negative impact. If we want to stop the looming disaster we need to kill off around half the global population, reduce family sizes and stop the greed.

It's a brave new world, indeed.

“The trouble is that people have no idea how to live the 1960s lifestyle that scaling back requires.”

Because we don't live in the fucking 1960s anymore. Were you there? I can born in 1969 so don't remember it but I haven't yet met anyhow who does remember it who yearns to go back to that, especially women for whom it was a time of serious inequality.

Reduce family sizes, my arse. STOP having families. But no one wants to go there.

I am always puzzled when someone says they have got rid of all the plastic in their kitchen and replaced it with glass and ceramic. OK then, but you have just added to the burden of plastic pollution needlessly. For heaven's sake, use your noggin. Keep and use what you already have. I have plastic stuff that is 50 years old and still fit for purpose.

I am also puzzled by the attitude that only recently have people woken up to environmental concerns. I read Diet for a Small Planet in my teens. I also insisted my family compost (partly because I loved to garden). I took courses in "ecology" in university.

We studied the "population explosion" and talked endlessly about the need to have fewer children. We worried about drought and famine in the world.

The truth is many of us evil baby boomers have been environmentally aware for decades. I had a real battle with my teen boys to recycle. I had to fish stuff out of the garbage.

In the 1970s energy conservation was huge. We added insulation to our house. We switched to more efficient appliances and ways to heat our homes.

We started shopping at bulk buy places, where you could refill containers. Yes, they were usually plastic containers, but I still have most of them. Do we know the carbon footprint of a glass jar to be much then than a long lived plastic bottle?

I don't mean to be preachy or engage in virtue signaling. I am just pointing out that we have had the tools and thinking for a long time.

On a lighter note, the book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler was required reading in my high school. It asserted that we would all have so much leisure time in the future (ie now) that we would be in a sort of boredom crisis. Not so much, it seems!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199107.DietforraSmalllPlanet

Were you there? I was indeed.

Yes and at least if you drop the glass ...

Actual tupperware is very good. Mine is about 25 years old.

I do recall the 70s. Nope, no desire to live like that again, either. I spent a lot of time talking to my dad who is now 83 last month. He's very glad how things have moved on. My mother who is 78 even more so.

Nope, not interested in subscribing to misguided asceticism.

I mean glass is more breakable

I know how we can solve the crisis on earth!

We have a worldwide hunger games, BUT we have two winners in each country. One man and one woman. They can repopulate, and hopefully teach the children to not over populate again.

No?

Agree, I think something has shifted in the zeitgeist OP.

Agreed.

I think the 1960s reference is more about plain old consumption isn't it?

People just didn't consume as much stuff back then - many household items were made to last and also advances were slower so you didn't replace your telly/phone/whatever else every couple of years in order to keep up or because it had given up the ghost. People didn't buy as many clothes and mended more clothes rather than just buying new stuff etc, less toys, certainly there were less cars and they weren't replaced every couple of years either, people didn't fly nearly as much, food was more local, much less packaging and plastic on everything, etc etc etc. Also, loads/credit/finance deals were not as part and parcel of life, so if you couldn't afford it you didn't buy it.

I'm certainly not saying the 60s was some sort of 'golden era' (I get enough of that from MIL) but I do think we consumed a hell of a lot less and I don't think we could ever go back to that lifestyle given what we are accustomed to now.

For heaven's sake, use your noggin. Keep and use what you already have. I have plastic stuff that is 50 years old and still fit for purpose

So do I, trying, but we might as well face it that such things aren't terribly brag-able on social media. Much more fun to show you're "on message" by posting whatever the latest pontificating zleb's deemed to be the answer to everything

People are misunderstanding the plastic arguments - plastic is a durable, cheap material which has many useful functions. It is single use plastic that we are trying to avoid. E.g. water bottles, pots of hummus - and lots of other food packaging.

Outsomnia

Lots of little changes can add up to big changes.

We have reduced our flying, we are using the train/driving as a family to Europe.

Grid electricity is now a third renewables, so using power in your house is greener than it was 10 years ago without you having to do anything. You can choose a green energy provider if you want to do more (the market has exploded in the past few years, much more competition therefore cheaper).

Electric cars are becoming very viable now - I've been driving one for 4 years, and there is a good 2nd hand market for people who can't afford new. I think car sharing will be the model we mainly use in future.

The whole world, bar 2 countries, signed up to the Paris climate change agreement.

I think your scepticism is possibly misplaced. But hey if you want to use that as an excuse not to take responsibility, you go right ahead. Why not start smoking in public places & stop your family wearing seatbelts too - which are all things we now take for granted which met lots of resistance originally.

I don't think people are "waking up" about the environment at all. I think most people take it tongue in cheek. I tend to think we are a very small country, and a few people going out of their way to "help the environment" by using glass and not plastic and only eating meat once a month wont make any difference long term when other much bigger countries continue as before. Plus we don't have records going back more than 100 years, so do we really know for sure that what is happening with climate isn't normal and part of a cycle. I think there are an awful lot of people out there who don't quite believe it .

I think it is isolated among certain sections of the British middle aged middle class, but if that is your social group, then yes.

I just had to fly to the States for my granny's funeral (which was two days after her death - so no option for taking a boat!). Not a single person where I am from even recycles, despite having bins. At the supermarket, they put about 4 items in each plastic bag and double bag any cans or milk. Most people drank bottled water and soft drinks, and loads eat with plastic plates and cutlery if they simply don't feel like washing dishes. I asked several people about why they don't just pour a glass of water, and they simply don't even register the impact. "I like the taste of x brand of water".

People AREN'T waking up. In fact, most of the people I saw are directly in the eye of this hurricane Dorian. If they thought about the impact, they would have to acknowledge the very real need in the next 20 years of moving their entire lives hundreds of miles away from their current homes. Many cannot get flood insurance without paying HUGE premiums because the insurance companies know the risk but people don't. The human brain can't comprehend that level of risk.

On these threads, I always recommend the book "Don't Even Think About It" by George Marshall. It explains why the vast majority of people will never "wake up".