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Grade humanity's respect of Earth

How do you think humanity is doing with respect to Earth since 1968?


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Antiwar

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Full poll question: When you look at the Christmas Eve 1968 picture of Earth from space, how do you think humanity is doing with respect to Earth since then?

It's Earth Day. You're one of billions of humans inhabiting the planet. American school grading system. I won't be grading your submissions.

Try to imagine that you're in the spacecraft. Imagine how that must've felt. What an achievement! But will we make it home?

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Caption: 1968: Earthrise (Apollo 8)

On Christmas Eve 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 held a live broadcast from lunar orbit, during which they showed photos of Earth and Moon as seen from their spacecraft. "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth," said Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell.

Image Credit: NASA

1968_Earthrise_297755main_GPN-2001-000009_full.jpeg



 
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We are ****ing ourselves and the planet hard. Really doubtful we will implement any change until it is too late.
 
We are ****ing ourselves and the planet hard. Really doubtful we will implement any change until it is too late.

The billionaires will have their luxury bunkers though, and that’s what really is important.

Who cares how many billions die so long as Jeff Bezos has maximized the amount of wealth he has?
 
Also my answer is “D”. We clearly aren’t doing well but we just as clearly could be doing worse.
 
We are ****ing ourselves and the planet hard. Really doubtful we will implement any change until it is too late.
Do some research and see where the richest people are buying property. It's very interesting.
 
Is it “where it will make them maximized profits”?
Replace maximized profits with maximized survival and you'll get it.
 
I think it's more interesting to grade ourselves on how we're doing with respect to our planet.

I give myself an A.
 
I think it's more interesting to grade ourselves on how we're doing with respect to our planet.

I give myself an A.

You “couldn’t be doing any better”?

You personally produce no pollutants, waste no resources, are 100% carbon neutral, etc?
 
I think it's more interesting to grade ourselves on how we're doing with respect to our planet.

I give myself an A.
Of course, that's what most folk will think of themselves, which is part of the reason we collectively get a D at best.
 
You “couldn’t be doing any better”?

You personally produce no pollutants, waste no resources, are 100% carbon neutral, etc?
Pretty close. When I last tried to audit our household about 18 months ago we were around 80% carbon neutral but I ought to re-estimate. 100% of our individual energy consumption is pure renewables now, we try to buy only carbon neutral products and donate generously to offsets e.g. reforestation.

What about you, how are you doing versus your personal carbon neutrality targets?
 
Of course, that's what most folk will think of themselves, which is part of the reason we collectively get a D at best.
Cool beans. What have you been doing when it comes to stewardship of our planet? Any 2022 deficits you're thinking of shoring up? What grade would you give yourself, or is it easier for you to grade everyone else because heaven forbid you wouldn't want to look inward?

I mean, C'mon. This thread including your post is mostly about ranting and pointing fingers at everyone but oneself. "Grade humanity's respect for the Earth" starts with "grade MY respect for the Earth" because that's where responsibility starts. For me, I've devoted my career to clean energy, and our household is trying to achieve carbon neutrality so I think I'm doing pretty good. What about you? What have you been doing to improve on that collective D?
 
Pretty close. When I last tried to audit our household about 18 months ago we were around 80% carbon neutral but I ought to re-estimate. 100% of our individual energy consumption is pure renewables now, we try to buy only carbon neutral products and donate generously to offsets e.g. reforestation.

What about you, how are you doing versus your personal carbon neutrality targets?

I don’t believe climate change can be meaningfully effected by individual action.

Also, I notice you ignored the first part of my question.
 
I don’t believe climate change can be meaningfully effected by individual action.

Also, I notice you ignored the first part of my question.
I will never consider a "couldn't be doing any better" option to be meaningful in a poll or question because it's red herring and and a trap. I will not let perfection be the enemy of the good. For example, I care about this issue enough that I've been working on clean energy technologies for about 14 years. However someone could always come along and say "well you COULD have been doing it for 15!" so I'm happy to let the people who insist on perfection in others stay on their islands and continue yelling at the clouds.

But it's good to know that you don't feel any personal responsibility as to this subject. It's too bad. There are too many people who buy goods that cannot be recycled, pile stuff into landfills, dump chemicals into their backyard lawns, then wax poetic about how respecting our planet is someone else's problem. These same people carry the same attitudes into workplaces, community organizations and eventually political leadership where their bad habits are further amplified. People who believe that caretaking of the planet is somebody else's responsibility inevitability become the problem.
 
I will never consider a "couldn't be doing any better" option to be meaningful in a poll or question because it's red herring and and a trap. I will not let perfection be the enemy of the good. For example, I care about this issue enough that I've been working on clean energy technologies for about 14 years. However someone could always come along and say "well you COULD have been doing it for 15!" so I'm happy to let the people who insist on perfection in others stay on their islands and continue yelling at the clouds.

But it's good to know that you don't feel any personal responsibility as to this subject. It's too bad. There are too many people who buy goods that cannot be recycled, pile stuff into landfills, dump chemicals into their backyard lawns, then wax poetic about how respecting our planet is someone else's problem.

My personal responsibility it to affect societal change. The amount of pollution I create is a literal drop in the bucket compared to capitalist corporations.
 
My personal responsibility it to affect societal change. The amount of pollution I create is a literal drop in the bucket compared to capitalist corporations.
Cool. How much societal change have you been successful in effecting? Any events you've put together that created forward momentum? Or at least some fundraisers? I imagine you've engaged deeply with some of these capitalist corporations to influence them in the right direction... any success stories you'd be willing to share?
 
Cool. How much societal change have you been successful in effecting? Any events you've put together that created forward momentum? I imagine you've engaged deeply with some of these capitalist corporations to influence them in the right direction... any success stories you'd be willing to share?

I’m fighting an uphill battle just getting Texans to not vote for fascists.
 
This thread ... is mostly about ranting and pointing fingers at everyone but oneself.

The thread I started is very specifically about how humanity as a whole has done since near the end of 1968.
 
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I mean, C'mon. This thread including your post is mostly about ranting and pointing fingers at everyone but oneself. "Grade humanity's respect for the Earth" starts with "grade MY respect for the Earth" because that's where responsibility starts. For me, I've devoted my career to clean energy, and our household is trying to achieve carbon neutrality so I think I'm doing pretty good. What about you? What have you been doing to improve on that collective D?
I didn't rant or point fingers; I noted the fact, and it is a fact, that people in general are notoriously bad at self-evaluation in areas like this. You've got a point here, but it's not one or the other: Accepting the reality and significance of collective impacts is, if anything, a necessary precusor to accepting the reality of one's own contribution and responsibility to that problem. On their own, the sort of impacts most individuals contribute would be negligible and wide open to an "I'm not doing anything wrong" attitude... as @Questerr has suggested even having acknowledged the collective problem.

In a post last month I raised a few general pointers about living sustainably, specifically with regard to our fellow humans but pretty much all applying to environmental issues too. It seems that the first three of those suggestions have not featured in your posts so far. Conversely some of your pointers (specifically working in an environmentally positive career) is absent from my lifestyle. Some similarly straightforward things which neither of us have mentioned include vacation habits - flying? cruising? resorts? - political advocacy, home gardening/locally sourced foods, how many new consumers we've decided to bring into the world, and stuff like freeganism or dumpster diving.

If average/DGAF lifestyle habits were a D, what's an A? The lowest target which could be even remotely reasonable would be 'not being part of the problem': Just living within what would be a sustainable average/normal, if everyone on the planet lived that way. Not actually contributing much if anything towards solutions per se, and indeed still contributing a bit, albeit a sustainable amount, towards what are actual problems at the unsustainable levels commonly seen. A comparatively easy target (if difficult to actually assess) though it's not clear whether either one of us would make it. As folk in wealthy countries, we're utterly surrounded by consumption of material resources so far above global averages (and even that abstract global average at present is wildly unsustainable) that even reducing, reusing etc., as much as seems feasible while maintaining a fairly 'normal' life seems unlikely to be good enough. Maybe if our discretionary spending (besides necessary food and housing) were below ~$10,000 per year? Why? It's a fair generalization to say that all economic activity has an ecological cost; even growing food or lumber uses land which in almost all cases would have been a richer natural habitat, likewise with mining or quarrying, and pretty much everything we do including even service industries ultimately require these primary industries plus transport and electricity. Since global average GDP per capita PPP is somewhere in the order of $16-20k, with an estimated ecological footprint of 1.7 earths, a sustainable average for all people would be around $10k. Of course $10k of economic activity will be much less impactful with environmentally-conscious consumer choices; but on the other hand, that's offset by the probability that $10k may be far too generous for a baseline figure since the contribution from actual individual incomes/consumption tends to be well under half of GDP per capita... and removing the necessary and potentially low impact expenses of locally-sourced(?) food and high-density(?) housing makes it an even more generous estimate.

Pretty sure I don't get an A even by that lowest possible standard of 'not being part of the problem,' of keeping my economic activity even vaguely within the ballpark for a possibly-sustainable human average... a standard which realistically should be more of a B than an A to begin with. So yeah, I might be doing 'better' than eight or ninety percent of folk in this country, one of the worst countries in the world for environmental impacts, but that ain't saying much! I'd give myself a well-earned C.
 
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My personal responsibility it to affect societal change. The amount of pollution I create is a literal drop in the bucket compared to capitalist corporations.
Are you suggesting that your contribution to societal change is more than a drop in the bucket? Our personal ecological footprints are a tiny, tiny fraction of a very major and quantifiable problem: If our societies' environmental/sustainability track records continue to worsen, then that tiny negative score is 'offset' by a tiny, tiny fraction of basically no detectable positive results.

It's true that our primary focus should be on systemic change; and it's true that for many people, largely insignificant tokenistic gestures like paper straws and 'reusable' shopping bags serve as a way to delude themselves that they've done their part rather than confronting the real challenges; and it's also true that personal responsibility can be and is used by some of the worst mega corporations as a smokescreen to distract from their 'externalities' and active, massive amplification of our problems, through what George Monbiot calls micro-consumerist bollocks. But on the other hand as @phoenix2020 has pointed out, if real, significant changes in lifestyle aren't part of our daily habit and personal character, firstly and most obviously we're still part of the problem and secondly, more subtly, it seems likely that any advocacy efforts will be limited if not undermined by those habits and character of the people engaged in them. We've got to hold ourselves to higher standards before demanding them of others.

Our focus on micro-consumerist bollocks aligns with the corporate agenda. The deliberate effort to stop us seeing the bigger picture began in 1953 with a campaign called Keep America Beautiful. It was founded by packaging manufacturers, motivated by the profits they could make by replacing reusable containers with disposable plastic. Above all, they wanted to sink state laws insisting that glass bottles were returned and reused. Keep America Beautiful shifted the blame for the tsunami of plastic trash the manufacturers caused on to “litter bugs”, a term it invented.

The “Love Where You Live” campaign, launched in the UK in 2011 by Keep Britain Tidy, Imperial Tobacco, McDonald’s and the sweet manufacturer Wrigley, seemed to me to play a similar role. It had the added bonus – as it featured strongly in classrooms – of granting Imperial Tobacco exposure to schoolchildren.

The corporate focus on litter, amplified by the media, distorts our view of all environmental issues. For example, a recent survey of public beliefs about river pollution found that “litter and plastic” was by far the biggest cause people named. In reality, the biggest source of water pollution is farming, followed by sewage. Litter is way down the list. It’s not that plastic is unimportant. The problem is that it’s almost the only story we know.
 
I'll let George Carlin speak for me:

 
I'll let George Carlin speak for me:


He's right, as usual, though perhaps not in the way you think. The mass extinctions being caused by human activity aren't a problem for 'the planet' in the long term - it's bounced back from them many times before - just a problem for the survival of human civilization. Those who aren't troubled by the possible collapse of human civilization and billions of people dying as a consequence of the actions and social structure they support can rest easy in their self-absorbed, morally bankrupt hedonism. Hopefully they don't plan on having grandchildren.
 
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