41 ms·

Being an earth dwelling human, this seems pretty bad. Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do? Is there an organiza

Being an earth dwelling human, this seems pretty bad. Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do? Is there an organization that is trying to rid the world of pesticides (assuming that's the cause)? If I opt to call my representatives, what am I calling in support of/against? Over the last year, reading the news had made me more passive and worried. I want to dedicate a slice of time to doing something to solve the problem, but I'm not certain if there's anything pragmatic to be done against big areas of environmental concern like this, global warming, ocean acidity, and etc.

flerbozorp 9y ago
If our problem is all the smoke we have to breath, and the embers, ashes and soot blown into our face, how do we fix it so that the camp fire doesn’t choke us, sting our eyes, and ruin our clothes? How do we control the camp fire that we keep buring right in the middle of our living room? It’s ruining the wall paper, and there’s a huge blackened stain on the ceiling. No matter how many showers I take, my clothes still smell like smoke. What gives?
m_mueller 9y ago
Not that I've planned it for that reason, but my family has the documents to live in either Japan or Switzerland. Both seem reasonable bets to me, i.e. protected by geography and with a pretty resilient local population. Have a read on the Bronze age collapse - when the global economy collapses, the main danger won't be environmental but due to human migration. In a functioning economy I'm very liberally minded towards freedom of movement (and in fact this lessens the danger I'm describing), but in a collapse, global inequality will come back to haunt the developed world in an apocalyptic fashion.
- point78 9y ago
  Two very expensive countries
- losteric 9y ago
  The developed world will use the first wave of immigration to build the walls that keep out the rest
- devmunchies 9y ago
  I would be interested on more reading on these topics (collapse, human migration, global inequality, defense, survival etc.)
- adrianN 9y ago
  Japan is way overpopulated. In the case that agriculture stops producing as much as it does now and food imports also dry up, Japan will be a very bad place to be. The country is mostly forest and mountain, arable land is rather scarce.
  - m_mueller 9y ago
    There's two main reasons way this doesn't scare me that much: 1) Japan's population is falling and I expect it to have fallen further, maybe to half or two thirds of current, until a global economical collapse. 2) There are ways to heavily increase the land use intensity with modern technology, which I'd expect to happen when the situation gets dicey. The Netherlands are a good example of how this can be done, essentially green houses everywhere. The actual bottleneck is how much energy you have, not the amount of land - Japan has lots of space in the sea for wind and solar energy, plus lots of unused geothermal.
Dove 9y ago
Try to help figure out why it's happening. Uninformed activism is unhelpful, and can cause people to ignore informed activism.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deelowe 9y ago
  Uhh pesticides. Duh!
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    ...also habitat loss, destruction of aspects of the overall food chain, Cline change, etc.
    - deelowe 9y ago
      Yeah, I think my sarcasm didn't go over well here.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Yeah hold on while I take 5-10 years out to get a bio degree and publish research so I can start putting out papers saying it's too late and we've passed the point of no return, which will be denied and ignored by the people who are most likely to be causing the problem. Much better than possibly pissing anyone off.
  - Dove 9y ago
    The concern is not pissing people off, exactly. It's crying wolf until the relevant people stop listening. It's drowning out the voices of those who really did spend three decades studying the problem in order to come up with the right answer. See how almost everyone's reply to the original post has a different recommendation? If they all worked hard to make those things happen, there would be a symphony of screams and no consensus and effective action. It's possible the right answer isn't even in there. It's possible the right answer even is, "Oops, wasn't a problem." When you act in uncertainty you make things worse. Yes, getting the right answer is hard. It may take a good chunk of a lifetime. If you really want to change the world for the better, though, it's not a step you can skip. Saving the world over lunch while you're young is a fantasy.
nathancahill 9y ago
This defeatist attitude is terrible. There's so, so much you can personally do, even if you personally can't create change on a global scale a la Bill Gates and co.
- graeme 9y ago
  They were asking for something proactive, to exit their defeatism. Perhaps you could suggest something. I suppose reducing spending and food waste is one way an individual can help. Or for specific problems like insects, if you have a lawn, don’t use pesticides, and cultivate areas of local plants. Grass only lawns aren’t very helpful for insects.
  - nathancahill 9y ago
    The list of things an individual can do to lessen their environmental impact could fill a book, and it's up to the person to determine where they can best act. These ideas are easily googleable, which is why I suggest that changing the attitude from "hole up with food and guns" to "look for ways to be proactive".
  - eric_h 9y ago
    I had a teacher in high school who frequently cracked a joke that his “ugly” lawn was only ugly because he was prioritizing biodiversity over beauty.
beambot 9y ago
> I want to dedicate a slice of time to doing something to solve the problem Eat less meat (huge environmental impact!), bike more, don't consume as much non-local food, etc.
- eksu 9y ago
  I wanted to tack on here that even our agriculture has a huge environmental impact — nothing worse for biodiversity than how we’ve replaced animal habitats with fields of a single crop! And then pesticides etc. I don’t know if it ever happen, but we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game. Properly Managed Captured Fisheries (Mostly more prosperous nations have well managed fisheries, outstanding fisheries would be in Alaska & New Zealand) allow us to extract protien we all need without destroying ecosystems. Same goes for captured game but that scales significantly worse. Fish farms are in a unique position because unlike farming animals on land, it can be done without radically changing the part of the ocean the fish are farmed in. I think recently there have been some problems with fish farms and antibiotic / illness spreading but I really think these can be overcome and that long term aquaculture would be the most environmentally conscious option. (In a similar position to electric cars today).
  - devmunchies 9y ago
    > we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game I guess if you HAVE to eat meat that is a better option, but we don't need it anymore. Its such an inefficient way to get calories and its not as nutritious as plant substitutes.
    - jm2721 9y ago
      Are you serious? Most of the plant substitutes for meat are based off nutrient-devoid grains, soy, and corn. It's also not at all an inefficient way to get calories; fat packs the most calories per gram, and fat (especially saturated fat) is not easily available in plants unless you're making a concerted effort to eat avocados, olives, and coconuts. I'd rather eat a fatty steak and be satiated for hours, than have the same calories from quinoa (or some other 'healthy' grain) and be ravenous 2 hours later when my insulin levels drop.
JamesBarney 9y ago
I would think donating to pro environmental lobbying groups. You be surprised how little large corporations spend on lobbying to influence politicians.
- earlyriser 9y ago
  I'm surprised by what you're saying about the small amount destined to lobbying. Do you have numbers about this?
  - SapphireSun 9y ago
    In aggregate, it looks like it's a few billion per year. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/ https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    You have to dig a little, but the average cost for the votes against net neutrality cost about 16,000 per US congressman who voted against it. http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=B http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=B
- HisGraceTheDuck 9y ago
  I do like my humour dry.
spodek 9y ago
People here argue things like that if whole industries, laws, etc don't change then an individual's actions don't matter. I see it the opposite. Only if I change can I expect or hope anyone else will. My list includes: - Flying less - Driving less - Eating low on the food chain - Avoiding packaged food - Owning and acquiring less stuff ... things like that. My life has never been better. I wish I had started this change decades earlier.
- jackmodern 9y ago
  to me this implies you don't travel or go out much. so what do you do for fun then?
  - maxander 9y ago
    I don’t see where you get that implication. Perhaps they’re spending a month in France rather than taking three one-week trips. Perhaps they’re living closer to town so that they don’t drive as much to get to work and their local hacker club. There’s lots of ways you can reorganize your life to be less resource-intensive without meaningful sacrifice, especially if you’re starting from the immensely wasteful late-20th-century-middle-class lifestyle.
    - colordrops 9y ago
      All you have to do is take on less flight in your life to make a huge impact. The carbon output per person of a round trip flight from NY to Phoenix is 806 pounds. http://gscleanenergy.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-much-gas-does-it-take-to-fly-you.html http://gscleanenergy.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-much-gas-does-...
  - spodek 9y ago
    It's one of the best decisions I've made. I have more adventure, culture, cuisine, and other values I used to get from travel, without the pollution and emissions. I posted about it here -- https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/365-days-without-flying.html https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/365-days-without-flying.ht..., although my views have continued to evolve since then -- and on my blog.
Jach 9y ago
Go into crispr research or other biological engineering fields if you want to do something directly. Figure out how to make less toxic pesticides that are economically substitutable (break-even or only slightly more costly than existing ones) rather than demanding that they're banned entirely, or if you're satisfied those exist already, lobby for their use. I suspect that whatever preventable problems we face we're not going to unite as a big collective to prevent them, especially when incentives don't align, but a few teams will be able to engineer solutions when the problems become actualized. Instead of asking how do we prevent problems, ask how we can solve problems given that they occur.
- sitkack 9y ago
  I am going into crispr to make pesticide immune versions of all the bugs we currently have. Effect change where you can.
  - sitepodmatt 9y ago
    Wouldn't that eventually mean you starve a large portion of the population as crop yields shrink dramatically?
    - sitkack 9y ago
      Let Them Eat Bugs!
      - dbcurtis 9y ago
        People are actually seriously proposing that. Very high in protein, and very efficient at converting feed to protein. I'm not sure it will catch on fast.... More seriously, we need to be pursuing sustainable agricultural practices. I believe that means treating crop fields as the complex microbiomes that they should be, instead of highly-tilled, species-restricted biomes. Read up on how no-till and low-till farming practices change the soil communities of worms and microbes. It's huge. We need to move away from heavy reliance on pesticide and herbicide for the health of the soil and environment neighboring the fields, not to mention our own. The thing is, we got to heavy chemical agriculture in part because of a drive to lower fuel consumption by making fewer passes over the field doing mechanical weed disruption. Of course, mechanical weed disruption is the kind of tillage that disrupts the soil biome, so we shouldn't go back, anyway, even if you could magically make diesel fuel cost $0. We need a new way forward to feed a hungry planet in a sustainable fashion.
QAPereo 9y ago
Being an earth dwelling human, this seems pretty bad. Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do? Build a time machine, and instill this sense of dismay, terror, and dawning realization into everyone then. Barring that, a series of technological miracles would help, but we needed them yesterday. Don’t have kids.
vacri 9y ago
> Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do? Yep, stop focusing on the movie-style end-of-the-world apocalypse, where it's just you and your guns versus the raiders. Instead of planning what you're going to do when it all turns to crap, do stuff now. In short, fix the world you're in, rather than planning for a world which really isn't going to happen. Talking to politicians is the first thing you can do - if they don't hear the noise, they're never going to do anything about it, and they're the decision-makers. Change your behaviours as other commentators have stated. Talk to your friends so they at least have heard the issue. But don't pretend that you're going to go off into the woods and survive like in a movie - if society ever did go that far, then you're fucked anyway - no doctors, no hospitals, no emergency services, no entertainment, no travel, so on and so forth. Few of us are actually comfortable with the idea of living permanently off the land (those survival rations won't last very long).
christophilus 9y ago
I think supporting permaculture is a big step we can all take. Have a look at Ben Falk's YouTube videos for a quick intro, or Sepp Holzer. We need to move towards a form of agriculture which does active good for the planet. It's possible to do. Edit: Also, a simple step: leave parts of your lawn unmowed for a full year. This gives insects and certain endangered birds much needed habitat in what is otherwise a wasteland of suburbian lawns.
- okreallywtf 9y ago
  It frustrates me that even though I am not in a HOA area, I cannot do this without getting letters from the city and fines. They will come mow my lawn for me and then charge me if I don't keep them mowed. Even my back yard which is almost 100% enclosed. I rent, otherwise I would build a wall right against my neighbors property so they wouldn't call the city on me for being able to see through a 5 foot gap into the back yard. I try to be considerate and keep the front and side clean but they even complained about there being too much wildlife back there (as if that was a bad thing). I usually have a whole bunny family living back there with birds and lots of bugs but eventually I have to mow it or have it mowed for me at my expense.
  - christophilus 9y ago
    Where the heck do you live? I'm in a small town in the south east coast of the US. I'm pretty sure our city crew would get fired (or shot) here for trying to forcibly mow someone's yard without their consent.
    - buttcoinslol 9y ago
      The key word is 'I rent'. Rental properties can be subject to more restrictions than owner-occupied properties and people who care enough to complain to the city (generally homeowners calling on rental properties) know when the laws of a jurisdiction is in their favor. Where I live, the city has the power to abate nuisances, which involves notifying the property owner with a period of time given to bring the cited issue into compliance. If the property owner fails to correct the issue, city workers correct it and the property owner is billed an (outrageous) hourly rate, minimum 1 hour.
dleslie 9y ago
Plant _local_ pollinating flowers and other plants that the insects rely upon, and encourage everyone you know that can do so to do the same.
BeetleB 9y ago
>Over the last year, reading the news had made me more passive and worried. Serious question: Did you only get serious with news reading in the last year or so?
TOGoS 9y ago
Join an organization that's doing something to tackle the root of the problem. Socialist Alternative is where I ended up, and I think they're great, but any group that's got a good understanding of the forces shaping the world and has a job for you that you feel is worth doing. Not that that's easy to find through all the noise. I only stumbled across SA because they were speaking at a NoDAPL rally that I happened to go to during a period of relative hopelessness after the election of the orange one.
elchief 9y ago
This is what I've done in the last two years: - Moved closer to work to minimize driving - Take the train downtown (on nights out) - Bike to work on occasion (it's a huge freaking hill) - Bought programmable thermostats, LED bulbs, vent louvres. Dropped electric use 20% - Eat organic (helps my IBS), cook at home, buy in bulk, freeze - Started composting and recycling more. My city has good programs for such - Ask for paper bags at grocery store, avoid plastics. Use glass storage containers, etc
- jopsen 9y ago
  - Bring a backpack to the grocery store, Note, though this won't scale, you need to take political action to make a real change.
  - pacifist 9y ago
    >> this won't scale Yes it will. If everyone does it that's called scaling.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      It helps, but not enough to solve the overarching problem.
  - elchief 9y ago
    Ugh, I hate people that bring their backpack to the grocery. It slows down the packing process a lot. Paper bags are a-okay with me.
anigbrowl 9y ago
https://deepgreenresistance.org/en/ https://deepgreenresistance.org/en/ Find or form a group in your area, consider dumping or downgrading your existing career which may well be meaningless anyway, and take up activism. At least you won't be subject to suffocating feelings of futility and guilt. Start tomorrow, it'll take you a year or two of work to figure out your new job so you'd better get busy with it.
- kiliantics 9y ago
  DGR have some really problematic politics when it comes to certain things but there is definitely some good material in there in terms of strategy. I'd recommend reading earth first! or black and green press for some better politics on a similar wavelength
ciconia 9y ago
Buy a piece of land (a prairie, woodland, marshland, whatever) and either let it sit without touching it, or take action to improve the ecosystem.
- Tharkun 9y ago
  My grandfather did this. One day he set out to go for a walk in his wee forest, only to discover that all the trees had been stolen. That's pretty much the thing holding me back from buying a small forested plot.
kiliantics 9y ago
Google Murray Bookchin

flerbozorp 9y ago

If our problem is all the smoke we have to breath, and the embers, ashes and soot blown into our face, how do we fix it so that the camp fire doesn’t choke us, sting our eyes, and ruin our clothes? How do we control the camp fire that we keep buring right in the middle of our living room? It’s ruining the wall paper, and there’s a huge blackened stain on the ceiling. No matter how many showers I take, my clothes still smell like smoke. What gives?

m_mueller 9y ago

Not that I've planned it for that reason, but my family has the documents to live in either Japan or Switzerland. Both seem reasonable bets to me, i.e. protected by geography and with a pretty resilient local population. Have a read on the Bronze age collapse - when the global economy collapses, the main danger won't be environmental but due to human migration. In a functioning economy I'm very liberally minded towards freedom of movement (and in fact this lessens the danger I'm describing), but in a collapse, global inequality will come back to haunt the developed world in an apocalyptic fashion.

point78 9y ago
Two very expensive countries
losteric 9y ago
The developed world will use the first wave of immigration to build the walls that keep out the rest
devmunchies 9y ago
I would be interested on more reading on these topics (collapse, human migration, global inequality, defense, survival etc.)
adrianN 9y ago
Japan is way overpopulated. In the case that agriculture stops producing as much as it does now and food imports also dry up, Japan will be a very bad place to be. The country is mostly forest and mountain, arable land is rather scarce.
- m_mueller 9y ago
  There's two main reasons way this doesn't scare me that much: 1) Japan's population is falling and I expect it to have fallen further, maybe to half or two thirds of current, until a global economical collapse. 2) There are ways to heavily increase the land use intensity with modern technology, which I'd expect to happen when the situation gets dicey. The Netherlands are a good example of how this can be done, essentially green houses everywhere. The actual bottleneck is how much energy you have, not the amount of land - Japan has lots of space in the sea for wind and solar energy, plus lots of unused geothermal.

Dove 9y ago

Try to help figure out why it's happening. Uninformed activism is unhelpful, and can cause people to ignore informed activism.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deelowe 9y ago
Uhh pesticides. Duh!
- QAPereo 9y ago
  ...also habitat loss, destruction of aspects of the overall food chain, Cline change, etc.
  - deelowe 9y ago
    Yeah, I think my sarcasm didn't go over well here.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Yeah hold on while I take 5-10 years out to get a bio degree and publish research so I can start putting out papers saying it's too late and we've passed the point of no return, which will be denied and ignored by the people who are most likely to be causing the problem. Much better than possibly pissing anyone off.
- Dove 9y ago
  The concern is not pissing people off, exactly. It's crying wolf until the relevant people stop listening. It's drowning out the voices of those who really did spend three decades studying the problem in order to come up with the right answer. See how almost everyone's reply to the original post has a different recommendation? If they all worked hard to make those things happen, there would be a symphony of screams and no consensus and effective action. It's possible the right answer isn't even in there. It's possible the right answer even is, "Oops, wasn't a problem." When you act in uncertainty you make things worse. Yes, getting the right answer is hard. It may take a good chunk of a lifetime. If you really want to change the world for the better, though, it's not a step you can skip. Saving the world over lunch while you're young is a fantasy.

nathancahill 9y ago

This defeatist attitude is terrible. There's so, so much you can personally do, even if you personally can't create change on a global scale a la Bill Gates and co.

graeme 9y ago
They were asking for something proactive, to exit their defeatism. Perhaps you could suggest something. I suppose reducing spending and food waste is one way an individual can help. Or for specific problems like insects, if you have a lawn, don’t use pesticides, and cultivate areas of local plants. Grass only lawns aren’t very helpful for insects.
- nathancahill 9y ago
  The list of things an individual can do to lessen their environmental impact could fill a book, and it's up to the person to determine where they can best act. These ideas are easily googleable, which is why I suggest that changing the attitude from "hole up with food and guns" to "look for ways to be proactive".
- eric_h 9y ago
  I had a teacher in high school who frequently cracked a joke that his “ugly” lawn was only ugly because he was prioritizing biodiversity over beauty.

beambot 9y ago

> I want to dedicate a slice of time to doing something to solve the problem Eat less meat (huge environmental impact!), bike more, don't consume as much non-local food, etc.

eksu 9y ago
I wanted to tack on here that even our agriculture has a huge environmental impact — nothing worse for biodiversity than how we’ve replaced animal habitats with fields of a single crop! And then pesticides etc. I don’t know if it ever happen, but we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game. Properly Managed Captured Fisheries (Mostly more prosperous nations have well managed fisheries, outstanding fisheries would be in Alaska & New Zealand) allow us to extract protien we all need without destroying ecosystems. Same goes for captured game but that scales significantly worse. Fish farms are in a unique position because unlike farming animals on land, it can be done without radically changing the part of the ocean the fish are farmed in. I think recently there have been some problems with fish farms and antibiotic / illness spreading but I really think these can be overcome and that long term aquaculture would be the most environmentally conscious option. (In a similar position to electric cars today).
- devmunchies 9y ago
  > we really should support capture fisheries, fish farms, and captured game I guess if you HAVE to eat meat that is a better option, but we don't need it anymore. Its such an inefficient way to get calories and its not as nutritious as plant substitutes.
  - jm2721 9y ago
    Are you serious? Most of the plant substitutes for meat are based off nutrient-devoid grains, soy, and corn. It's also not at all an inefficient way to get calories; fat packs the most calories per gram, and fat (especially saturated fat) is not easily available in plants unless you're making a concerted effort to eat avocados, olives, and coconuts. I'd rather eat a fatty steak and be satiated for hours, than have the same calories from quinoa (or some other 'healthy' grain) and be ravenous 2 hours later when my insulin levels drop.

JamesBarney 9y ago

I would think donating to pro environmental lobbying groups. You be surprised how little large corporations spend on lobbying to influence politicians.

earlyriser 9y ago
I'm surprised by what you're saying about the small amount destined to lobbying. Do you have numbers about this?
- SapphireSun 9y ago
  In aggregate, it looks like it's a few billion per year. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/ https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  You have to dig a little, but the average cost for the votes against net neutrality cost about 16,000 per US congressman who voted against it. http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=B http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=B
HisGraceTheDuck 9y ago
I do like my humour dry.

spodek 9y ago

People here argue things like that if whole industries, laws, etc don't change then an individual's actions don't matter. I see it the opposite. Only if I change can I expect or hope anyone else will. My list includes: - Flying less - Driving less - Eating low on the food chain - Avoiding packaged food - Owning and acquiring less stuff ... things like that. My life has never been better. I wish I had started this change decades earlier.

jackmodern 9y ago
to me this implies you don't travel or go out much. so what do you do for fun then?
- maxander 9y ago
  I don’t see where you get that implication. Perhaps they’re spending a month in France rather than taking three one-week trips. Perhaps they’re living closer to town so that they don’t drive as much to get to work and their local hacker club. There’s lots of ways you can reorganize your life to be less resource-intensive without meaningful sacrifice, especially if you’re starting from the immensely wasteful late-20th-century-middle-class lifestyle.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    All you have to do is take on less flight in your life to make a huge impact. The carbon output per person of a round trip flight from NY to Phoenix is 806 pounds. http://gscleanenergy.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-much-gas-does-it-take-to-fly-you.html http://gscleanenergy.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-much-gas-does-...
- spodek 9y ago
  It's one of the best decisions I've made. I have more adventure, culture, cuisine, and other values I used to get from travel, without the pollution and emissions. I posted about it here -- https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/365-days-without-flying.html https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/365-days-without-flying.ht..., although my views have continued to evolve since then -- and on my blog.

Jach 9y ago

Go into crispr research or other biological engineering fields if you want to do something directly. Figure out how to make less toxic pesticides that are economically substitutable (break-even or only slightly more costly than existing ones) rather than demanding that they're banned entirely, or if you're satisfied those exist already, lobby for their use. I suspect that whatever preventable problems we face we're not going to unite as a big collective to prevent them, especially when incentives don't align, but a few teams will be able to engineer solutions when the problems become actualized. Instead of asking how do we prevent problems, ask how we can solve problems given that they occur.

sitkack 9y ago
I am going into crispr to make pesticide immune versions of all the bugs we currently have. Effect change where you can.
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
  Wouldn't that eventually mean you starve a large portion of the population as crop yields shrink dramatically?
  - sitkack 9y ago
    Let Them Eat Bugs!
    - dbcurtis 9y ago
      People are actually seriously proposing that. Very high in protein, and very efficient at converting feed to protein. I'm not sure it will catch on fast.... More seriously, we need to be pursuing sustainable agricultural practices. I believe that means treating crop fields as the complex microbiomes that they should be, instead of highly-tilled, species-restricted biomes. Read up on how no-till and low-till farming practices change the soil communities of worms and microbes. It's huge. We need to move away from heavy reliance on pesticide and herbicide for the health of the soil and environment neighboring the fields, not to mention our own. The thing is, we got to heavy chemical agriculture in part because of a drive to lower fuel consumption by making fewer passes over the field doing mechanical weed disruption. Of course, mechanical weed disruption is the kind of tillage that disrupts the soil biome, so we shouldn't go back, anyway, even if you could magically make diesel fuel cost $0. We need a new way forward to feed a hungry planet in a sustainable fashion.

QAPereo 9y ago

Being an earth dwelling human, this seems pretty bad. Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do? Build a time machine, and instill this sense of dismay, terror, and dawning realization into everyone then. Barring that, a series of technological miracles would help, but we needed them yesterday. Don’t have kids.

vacri 9y ago

> Aside from buying ammo or survival rations, what's something proactive that I can do? Yep, stop focusing on the movie-style end-of-the-world apocalypse, where it's just you and your guns versus the raiders. Instead of planning what you're going to do when it all turns to crap, do stuff now. In short, fix the world you're in, rather than planning for a world which really isn't going to happen. Talking to politicians is the first thing you can do - if they don't hear the noise, they're never going to do anything about it, and they're the decision-makers. Change your behaviours as other commentators have stated. Talk to your friends so they at least have heard the issue. But don't pretend that you're going to go off into the woods and survive like in a movie - if society ever did go that far, then you're fucked anyway - no doctors, no hospitals, no emergency services, no entertainment, no travel, so on and so forth. Few of us are actually comfortable with the idea of living permanently off the land (those survival rations won't last very long).

christophilus 9y ago

I think supporting permaculture is a big step we can all take. Have a look at Ben Falk's YouTube videos for a quick intro, or Sepp Holzer. We need to move towards a form of agriculture which does active good for the planet. It's possible to do. Edit: Also, a simple step: leave parts of your lawn unmowed for a full year. This gives insects and certain endangered birds much needed habitat in what is otherwise a wasteland of suburbian lawns.

okreallywtf 9y ago
It frustrates me that even though I am not in a HOA area, I cannot do this without getting letters from the city and fines. They will come mow my lawn for me and then charge me if I don't keep them mowed. Even my back yard which is almost 100% enclosed. I rent, otherwise I would build a wall right against my neighbors property so they wouldn't call the city on me for being able to see through a 5 foot gap into the back yard. I try to be considerate and keep the front and side clean but they even complained about there being too much wildlife back there (as if that was a bad thing). I usually have a whole bunny family living back there with birds and lots of bugs but eventually I have to mow it or have it mowed for me at my expense.
- christophilus 9y ago
  Where the heck do you live? I'm in a small town in the south east coast of the US. I'm pretty sure our city crew would get fired (or shot) here for trying to forcibly mow someone's yard without their consent.
  - buttcoinslol 9y ago
    The key word is 'I rent'. Rental properties can be subject to more restrictions than owner-occupied properties and people who care enough to complain to the city (generally homeowners calling on rental properties) know when the laws of a jurisdiction is in their favor. Where I live, the city has the power to abate nuisances, which involves notifying the property owner with a period of time given to bring the cited issue into compliance. If the property owner fails to correct the issue, city workers correct it and the property owner is billed an (outrageous) hourly rate, minimum 1 hour.

dleslie 9y ago

Plant _local_ pollinating flowers and other plants that the insects rely upon, and encourage everyone you know that can do so to do the same.

BeetleB 9y ago

>Over the last year, reading the news had made me more passive and worried. Serious question: Did you only get serious with news reading in the last year or so?

TOGoS 9y ago

Join an organization that's doing something to tackle the root of the problem. Socialist Alternative is where I ended up, and I think they're great, but any group that's got a good understanding of the forces shaping the world and has a job for you that you feel is worth doing. Not that that's easy to find through all the noise. I only stumbled across SA because they were speaking at a NoDAPL rally that I happened to go to during a period of relative hopelessness after the election of the orange one.

elchief 9y ago

This is what I've done in the last two years: - Moved closer to work to minimize driving - Take the train downtown (on nights out) - Bike to work on occasion (it's a huge freaking hill) - Bought programmable thermostats, LED bulbs, vent louvres. Dropped electric use 20% - Eat organic (helps my IBS), cook at home, buy in bulk, freeze - Started composting and recycling more. My city has good programs for such - Ask for paper bags at grocery store, avoid plastics. Use glass storage containers, etc

jopsen 9y ago
- Bring a backpack to the grocery store, Note, though this won't scale, you need to take political action to make a real change.
- pacifist 9y ago
  >> this won't scale Yes it will. If everyone does it that's called scaling.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    It helps, but not enough to solve the overarching problem.
- elchief 9y ago
  Ugh, I hate people that bring their backpack to the grocery. It slows down the packing process a lot. Paper bags are a-okay with me.

anigbrowl 9y ago

https://deepgreenresistance.org/en/ https://deepgreenresistance.org/en/ Find or form a group in your area, consider dumping or downgrading your existing career which may well be meaningless anyway, and take up activism. At least you won't be subject to suffocating feelings of futility and guilt. Start tomorrow, it'll take you a year or two of work to figure out your new job so you'd better get busy with it.

kiliantics 9y ago
DGR have some really problematic politics when it comes to certain things but there is definitely some good material in there in terms of strategy. I'd recommend reading earth first! or black and green press for some better politics on a similar wavelength

ciconia 9y ago

Buy a piece of land (a prairie, woodland, marshland, whatever) and either let it sit without touching it, or take action to improve the ecosystem.

Tharkun 9y ago
My grandfather did this. One day he set out to go for a walk in his wee forest, only to discover that all the trees had been stolen. That's pretty much the thing holding me back from buying a small forested plot.

kiliantics 9y ago

Google Murray Bookchin