Ugh … We’re raping the environment. This is discussing how we can keep our victim alive so we can rape more.
Why can’t we just dial back on the rape of nature?
Look, we’ll just have to figure out what a sustainable rape would be.
Heh … I was hemming a bit melodramatic yesterday, but that’s what this conversation always feels like to me. We have this fundamentally usurious and destructive relationship with an other (Earth), and we’re trying to figure out ways that we can keep using, but not have her die on us.
Why don’t we just live a more reciprocal and life-giving relationship. If we could collectively decide to live simple lives with less stuff and more experiences and community we could have healthy planet and I bet we’d be happier too.
… but you know,. It takes some vision.
Living more simply sounds good when you’re a American in your suburban house with giant car you think about how your quality of life could be just as good in a small apartment in a walkable city.
Living more simply is not as appealing if you’re in a slum in India or Indonesia or a farmer in rural China and you barely have enough to eat as it is.
We who have rich lives should consume less, just as a moral obligation. But it’s not feasible to tell the whole world to consume less, because the vast majority of the world consumes far less per capita than the developed West, and their standard of living sucks, and they want more stuff. And quite honestly they deserve it.
On an individual level I understand the appeal of simplification and using less. But it’s not an effective solution to global climate change. India and China and Nigeria and Indonesia and so on will not accept degrowth. Their choices are between sustainable development and unsustainable development. And so that’s the choice the world faces.
Yes, but over consumption really is a first world problem, isn’t it? If we ended consumerism as a norm more than 95% of the problem would disappear.
Anecdote time!
We have a tree growing up through our deck we built around the tree, it’s been growing for sixteen years now since bailing the deck, we keep removing bits of the deck to make room for the tree.
Someone asked us why we don’t just cut the tree down instead.
Two fundamentally different schools of thoughts.