What I care about most are children who will be born centuries from now. People I will never meet, or see.
What they will learn about is the mass extinction underway.
They will see how human society of today was motivated by money. Even when problems like climate change and extinction and deforestation were well understood, the solutions posed were to throw money at it. People whose opinions about the topic were politically correct would get nice jobs to phone in their outrage.
Markets are everything. Markets, exchange of money, trade, was the river that wore away mountains of evolutions.
Our only meaningful efforts are to understand our own marketplaces, and to remove barriers to those which are environmentally good, and remove subsidies to those that suck.
Over 40 years ago, I already understood that my - and everyone else's - consumption of materials was a tax on the planet. I understood the relationship between mining and forestry and bushmeat (you build roads to mine copper out of sight of NIMBYs, and the poachers use those roads to kill endangered animals to serve on exotic food platters).
All I could figure out to do was to live a life that was on the sustainable end of human consumption - recycling. But I kind of knew then that I was surfing atop an ocean of denial.
Now all the best species evolved on earth over millions of centuries are going to die off, in my field of vision.
Throwing money at things we suffer angst over just builds statues of heroic efforts.
Primum non nocere - first do no harm. Environmentalist who mean well cannot afford to be spending decades doing wreckless meme-harm to sustainable markets. Jim Puckett saw Asian people re-using CRT monitors and labelled them as primitives, labelled Americans selling to them as evil exploiters, and he is the primary tool by which Planned Obsolescence Industries created Big Shred Industries to destroy the secondhand products that competed with their new products. They left massive CERCLA (Superfund) piles of ruined messes. Now Jim is turning to plastic recycling, his next demon, with his rolodex of bigoted race baiting do-gooder tropism to light the fire - just as the jackbooted Chinese authorities burned HP ink cartridges in the streets of Foshan when his Guiyu Harm report came out. That report took water samples from textile mills and falsely associated them with CRT refurbishing factories. He did it for money, of course, but I don't know if he even knows that.
The point here isn't to lash out at Jim. He's just a tool. But he is an environmentalist, he did mean well, he earned lots of respect from lots of altruists. The point here is that the world is on fire, we have a mass extinction going on, and either people will use stuff for 5 years and buy new, or use stuff for 15 years. I'm about using stuff for 15 years, because the 5 year model has three times more mining and carbon.
But years are seconds, and species that took millennia to evolve are being wiped out by the minute.
So, big picture, Jim Puckett's an example of a mistake, but is just a breast stroke the wrong direction towards a waterfall. I'm two breastrokes in the right direction. But we are both consumers. And the fact we are white men is a nonsequetor... no future child or adult 400 years from now will understand what "Critical Race Theory" had to do with anything. At the rate of intermarriage, it's impossible to imagine that racism will be possible a century from now.
Speciesism. That's the topic.
We need free market incentives that protect habitats and species. This is about a river of consumption that's flooded with rising affluence worldwide. The harm being done by the good news of rising per capita wealth can be flattened by recycling and reuse. But human consumption is a type of pandemic to Earth's sustainable future that is visible from space.
No comments:
Post a Comment