I don't know what sociologists & psychologists would say, but I think the group action problem continues to be a big hurdle. There is a tremendous variety of changes I & my spouse would be willing to make, costs we would be willing to pay- except if only we do it, it makes not one iota of difference. (Our compromise has been that we focus our efforts on positive changes that also save us money, like insulation, efficiency, shade, biking, etc)

Frankly it's also currently a lot of work to constantly make all the "right" choices. Taking the "right" actions would be significantly easier with a stronger "systems" solution. For example, a carbon tax or neonicotinoid ban would instantly make it zero-effort to buy low-carbon or bee-friendly.

Consumer-choice oriented campaigns like the Rainforest Alliance et al are absolutely well intentioned but the message of saving the world through our purchasing decisions may have indirectly disenfranchised our capacity for collective action.

Don’t think about doing the « right » thing. Thinking like this is extremism.

What is important is acquiring the knowledge of your impacts.

Once you decide to acquire this knowledge, there is no more « right » or « wrong » way to act. There is only « reasonable », « unreasonable », « exceptional », « I don’t know let’s check this I’m curious ». You have the right to make the wrong choices as long as you are able to accept you were wrong.

What I like with this approach, is that it’s not self-flagellation anymore, it’s the joy of understanding the beautiful and complex world we live in.

You are not thinking about what the others do, you are just working towards being a better human. And this is easily transmissible around you without proselytism.

Surely you're the enlightened one and everyone you know is willfully blind.

Or maybe they're pragmatic and begrudgingly accept that to maintain any semblance of modern life, they have to participate in however society functions *now*.

I'm in no position, financial or otherwise, to go off-grid, ride my bike everywhere, delete my car, home cook every meal with locally grown ingredients. Or to decrease my energy consumption through buying less VPS time, buying and using test equipment, parts, protypes made overseas with no pollution regulations. I can do better than I'm doing now, but not by much unless there truly is some massive, global-level, snap-of-the-fingers change. Reason being, if I do, it's essentially self-harm, like a social suicide. I suffer, I lose jobs, contracts, my livelihood, relationships, etc while the rest of the world happily moves on without me. Which yeah, it fits the idea of your of complaint.

The majority of your acquaintances who you've written off as stuck in the dark ages don't have the ability to make the extraordinary changes that you demand for removing that label. Your statement was more philosophical than demanding specific action, but ignoring the reality of humans and human society so you can shit on us from your tower is not helpful.

So this is how you justify it to yourself? Honest question. It seems you acknowledge the legitimacy and urgency of the problem but are unwilling to make changes due to it being social suicide?

This is kind of where I feel I am, so I'm curious for you to expand. Do you have kids? Will you be able to tell them you did something positive about this problem? Or greedily stayed complicit due to the inconvenience? Are you prepared to tell your daughter you were the part of the people killing all the wildlife on earth? I know that sounds super aggressive but I'm legitimately asking. This stuff goes through my head for myself, so I'm curious how you address it?

I stay at a level of selfishness that I'm comfortable with. I do what I can to make the little things I can control better, I lead by example when I get the chance, and I understand that I'm not going to change society so it's (selfishly) not worth it for me to be a zealot.

I don't have kids, but I'd like to. I know even that's the "selfish" answer, but I can attempt to justify it by teaching them to be good stewards and thereby doing something positive about the problem. Calling it passing the problem on, but they'll have better tools than me to cope with it because we're building those tools right now. At the very least, I'd hope my daughter would be smart enough to understand that being "part of the people killing all the wildlife on earth" is a gross simplification of an incredibly complex social and scientific environment.

> So this is how you justify it to yourself? Honest question.

Sounds more like a loaded question.

Not the OP, but I'll take your questionnaire

> So this is how you justify it to yourself?

I don't justify anything. In my opinion, a first world life as it exists today is unjustifiable. But that doesn't mean it's my fault, or that I can do anything about it.

> It seems you acknowledge the legitimacy and urgency of the problem but are unwilling to make changes due to it being social suicide?

It would be impossible for me personally to make meaningful changes. I live in a city with no infrastructure. The USA has so much inefficiency baked into its supply chain due to globalism it's ridiculous. Everyone is anti-nuclear, no politician represents me or these interests. I recycle, I carry my own bag to the store, etc. I drive more than an hour every day even though I would like to not own a car. I can't ever not be employed because losing the insurance would literally kill me due to a medical condition.

> Do you have kids?

I will probably never have children because I don't really believe in the future.

> Will you be able to tell them you did something positive about this problem? Or greedily stayed complicit due to the inconvenience? Are you prepared to tell your daughter you were the part of the people killing all the wildlife on earth?

Here's the deal. All of our carbon footprints here probably suck, but you're playing into the hands of the real evil by framing things this way. Counterintuitively, pushing for individual responsibility for pollution and environmental degradation is exactly what big corporations want because it enables their destruction more than any other single thing. If I had a child, I would educate them not to make this argument but to push for structural reform and deprogramming of this mindset.

Have you ever heard of the Keep America Beautiful [1] campaign? It's where a lot of this sentiment comes from, and it was funded by Coca-Cola in response to a rise in sentiment supporting legislation to reign in environmental destruction on the part of big corporations. Greenwashing campaigns have been very effective at shifting public attention away from corporate responsibility and towards the individual. I'll 'do my part' to consume less, but I refuse to put responsibility for these corporate / government structures on myself. Especially after they've gone to such lengths to gaslight us all.

> This stuff goes through my head for myself, so I'm curious how you address it?

One thing I've brainstormed with a similarly-concerned friend would be to create a series of localized handout materials tying politicians that people in the area can vote for to specific environmental atrocities directly in an easy-to-understand fashion. That would be a pretty non-trivial effort though, would require cooperation from a lot of other people, and could get us in a lot of trouble. Maybe one day.

[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful)

I don't understand why you think that I would write off anyone as 'stuck in the dark ages'.

So I guess that might be misunderstanding my argument. I'm not demanding any actions, my point is not that everyone but me is doing to little and that we should do more to save the environment and our planet. That's a good argument (well, except for the 'everyone but me' part) but not the one I'm making.

My argument - or rather; the conclusion - that I've come to - is that we are mentally unable to accept the dire consequences of our current situation. It's not even that we don't /want/ to fix things, it's that most of the people cannot accept the fact of the situation we're in, because the of the absolutely devastating consequences we are facing, namely extinction.

We are unable to accept that. It's too big. It's too grandiose, too preposterous. We cannot imagine this happening. And so we deny it, continue with the lives we've grown accustomed to, with the pleasures we enjoy and the dangers we know. And because everyone around us continues the charade and we feel comforted in our not-quite-conscious decision to ignore the situation and continue as before.

I expect that this is to a large part the fate of any species "finding the ultimate exploits" in the game of life. That also answers the questions of; why isn't there anybody out there: any species evolved in the context of competition for resources is unable to handle the transition to a steady-state and after a brief and glorious period of unchecked growth collapses into itself.

We are - after all - reproduction machines.

I grapple with this every day. It is painful to look around and see that no one is paying attention or cares. There is all this talk of being Woke nowadays but I believe these people are only woke in the one particular way - around race, sex, etc. To be truly Woke you need to be cognizant of how everything you do impacts the world around you. People go to great lengths to understand racial injustice but won't spend even a minute talking about the ecological issues. Crazy thing is that no matter your race, sexual orientation, pronoun, or whatever else basically have nothing in comparison to climate change and ecological collapse. These things affect all, not just some groups. I don't mean to diminish racial justice, but this is so much bigger than that. I'm scared.

The ship has hit the iceberg a while ago and we trifle about the variance of the dance we should all perform.

Isn't it?

I'm scared too.

"Humans had their chance, and nature selected them... for extinction." ~ paraphrasing Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park.

Human intelligence is a product of evolution, and that evolution apparently didn't provide us the kind of attributes that would keep us from destroying ourselves or our environment (or destroying ourselves is some kind of evolutionary advantage, but that's the kind of assessment that can only be made by whatever comes after us).

I don't think it's too late from a "technical perspective". We could absolutely change our behaviour and priorities and fix the problems that will ultimately end us as a species in the near future if we do nothing. We have that capability.

But since witnessing the pandemic and how the human race has responded to it, rapid vaccine development notwithstanding, I have pretty much zero confidence that will happen. At this point when I look at climate change and other impacts from our insistence on exploiting and trashing our planet and its ecosystems, I would be shocked to learn that humans were around and thriving a couple hundred years from now.

The difficult reality for me is not that there's nothing we can do, it's that there are things we can do, but a sufficient portion of the human population will simply not be convinced to do those things before it's too late, even as the impacts of the very problems they are being asked to acknowledge and accept are destroying their own lives.

I agree with your assessment.

I'm afraid we are - as I mentioned further up in the thread - are just not mentally equipped to be able to process the situation we - as a species - find ourselves in.

This is the Fermi paradox as it is happening - civilizations invariably destroy themselves after short periods in astronomical time scale, otherwise we should see more evidence of extraterrestrial life if Drake equation is a remotely accurate model.

I've come to the same conclusion.