Since I’ve been getting piled on for my snark, just to be clear I’m not saying there’s equal responsibility or burden here. Of course the corporations that are killing the planet shoulder most of the responsibility, but that doesn’t mean we should just shrug and impotently wag our fingers at the powers that be. Your own choices matter as well.
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If I am not mistaken, that’s no indian. Just an actor playing one. Though I’ve also read that “Chief Seattle” didn’t exactly say what he said, it was an Earth Day era version from environmentalists.
Chief Joseph did say “I will fight no more forever” before landing on the Colville reservation with the distant cousins. But some of these quotes are weird, I found one recorded by my great, great, great grandfather in a book that collected bits of speeches from native people. But the point of the book is to show the great speeches native people made. The only oroblem is these are translations, so how much of tge great speech comes from the translation?
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They’re still around in the northeast but they have a plastic screw-on cap assembly fused to them.
Yes. And we shouldn’t be using either. Seems
Like we could come up with a few solutions that work depending on the needs and resources available. Bamboo and hemp are feasibly sustainable and both can be made into reasonable replacements for just about everything, but neither has been explored in scale. Fucking corporations.
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Me thinks the corporations should pay a recycle tax on every piece of plastic they unleash on the planet, with the tax used to pay consumers to bring the plastic back to the store that sold it, and with a very high penalty for plastic items that are inherently unrecyclable.
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The planet’s Fucked, it’s your fault, and it’s getting worse! Have a nice weekend.
Yeah, we - the country - banned shopping bags earlier this year. Astonishingly, civilisation did not end, and neither have we been afflicted with zombie hordes roaming the streets mindlessly searching for plastic shopping bags to line their rubbish bins.
Seriously.
Despite repeated “oh-woe-is-me-how-will-I-cope” stories everyone … just got on with it^. Surprisingly quickly, and with surprisingly little fuss.
What has been kinda interesting is how it’s changed the conversation. Last year the conversation was all “but how will we cope without plastic bags?” This year the conversation is all “Huh, that was easy. What else can we get rid of?”
Not coincidentally, the city banned plastic straws earlier this year too. Again, people just adapted. Paper straws, personal metal straws they carry with them everywhere, or just not using straws. Really, the adjustment is not that hard.
^ Of course, I also have one acquaintance who did some calculations and then went out and bought himself a couple of cartons of shopping bags - about 8,000 in total - so that he’d have enough bags for the rest of his life. I think he was a little upset when I didn’t loudly laud him for his wisdom and foresight.
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Right!? It’s like every other government regulation from motorcycle helmets to child car seats to Energy efficient lightbulbs (for the record you can still buy traditional bulbs). People freak out at the idea but then things get along just fine. Of course in my examples those things were all changed at the industrial level and didn’t rely on consumers to decide to do it individually.
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So, all of us are expected to be responsible enough to protect the planet, but none of us are trustworthy enough to attend a movie without armed supervision…
When did we fall down this wormhole again?
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This is worth another posting. It’s long, but very informative on many aspects of the industry and the effects of plastic in general, from a European perspective:
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I’ve certainly encountered similar complaints on social media and it is naked discrimination and objectionable. But these are problems that can be dealt with.
And I reiterate, this is not just about straws. An individual campaign might be about straws but it is part of a much wider ecosystem of anti-plastics campaigning that has had extraordinary cut through In a very short space of time. Legislation and regulation follow, but that doesn’t just appear out of thin air. It happens because of the social license brought about by campaigning.
And, at least over here, companies are responding. It’s going to take time to reconfigure supply chains away from single use plastics, but the ball has been set rolling.
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This is exactly how it should work. It looks like we might get reverse vending machines in the UK which will pay out for materials returned. I dearly hope it happens.
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Where I live we still have that kind of things, for glass bottles, 0.20 € for each. It’s a great way to make glass more eco friendly since the bottling factory is not far, a bottle is reused an average of 20 time and can have a 30 year life span !
Sadly it’s not a thing you see much in France. I think Germany is way better.
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Not a gallon, 750 ml but the liter version is in plastic
https://www.carrefour.fr/p/jus-de-pomme-de-bretagne-reflets-de-france-3245390020390
The apple juice is 1 liter.
So is difficult (at least in continental Europe find imperial sized glass container, but easy to find metric glass containers.
Or make plastic bags with starchy substances. Here happened and to make people use reusable bags there’s a small ‘bag tax’ one has to pay to all plastic bags, even the organic ones. Paper bags are exempt.
Most shops give you the corrugated paper boxes that were using for packing the things.
Almost all people have adapted. In some rare cases people tried not to buy the bags in creative ways, like using trash bags… but people are strange.
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Relying on top down regulations is extremely risky because it’s a single point of failure. What environmental regulations have come from the likes of Trump and Bolsonaro?
Dual power, in the libertarian socialist sense, is the way to go in my opinion.
Libertarian socialists have more recently appropriated the term to refer to the nonviolent strategy of achieving a libertarian socialist economy and polity by means of incrementally establishing and then networking institutions of direct participatory democracy to contest the existing power structures of state and capitalism. This does not necessarily mean disengagement with existing institutions; for example, Yates McKee describes a dual-power approach as “forging alliances and supporting demands on existing institutions – elected officials, public agencies, universities, workplaces, banks, corporations, museums – while at the same time developing self-organized counter-institutions.”[29] In this context, the strategy itself is sometimes also referred to as “counterpower” to differentiate it from the term’s Leninist origins.
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The problem with drinking straws is precisely the amount of effort we spend bickering about drinking straws. Saying that straws are a distraction makes them even more of a distraction, it just lets people go smugly “well now I know straws are pointless and capitalism is vaguely bad, and look, I’ve tweeted and commented about it” and that’s their environmental contribution for the next week.
The appropriate response should be “yeah whatever, what are you gonna do next”. It’s the bike-shed effect in action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
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I’m highly skeptical to say the least. Bill gates or Elon musk might start a great foundation to try to cure malaria or send a rocket to the moon, but they aren’t stopping other profit making industries from doing destructive things. As long as there is money to be made from doing bad stuff people will still do bad stuff. Unless it become illegal to do that thing. or How about we actually participate in democracy when we get a Trump.
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I don’t think that socialists are fans of Bill Gates or Elon Musk, at least I’m not. I also don’t trust green capitalism to actually solve the problems we may face over the next century. This does not mean that I trust governments to do the right things for long enough that the environment recovers
My views are similar to those of Murray Bookchin.
The whole point is that we run our communities in parallel to larger governments, with the aim of filling in the gaps that government leaves. Long term, the idea is to take over from top down government rule with bottom up federations of communities, but that isn’t relevant to what is happening today unless you are in North East Syria.
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That was just my knee jerk reaction to the “libertarian” part. If you’re advocating for top down regulation on a local level before we get top down regulation on a national level, we’ll yeah of course. It’s a huge step forward when cities or states commit to recycling, renewable energy or even more social things like protecting immigrants, health services etc.
