More than anything, it’s economic. Beginning with the industrial revolution in the 18th century our species has spent over two hundred and fifty years building up more and more artifacts driven by short and sometimes medium term profit potential and ignoring or paying only lip-service to the externalized environmental cost.
The equivalent sustainable industry, including recycling industry on par with whatever production industry we wind up with by a given point in time, not to mention cleanup of most of the trash we’ve dumped in the oceans, represents an enormous expense in financial, human and political capital along with the cost in decreased production growth, all for relatively small short term financial profit potential.
The long term cost of not doing so is essentially 100%, since we can’t operate industry without a viable habitat, and that horizon is approaching the medium and in some cases short term, but doing so in a way that anthropocentric climate change deniers and their robber baron funded propaganda outlets convince people who don’t want to face the music is unrelated or it’s already too late. By the time it’s collapsing the short term gains of these firms, it may well be to late.
TL;DR ~ Late stage capitalism is immolating and taking the planet with it.
Distinguishing economics from language sort of illustrates my point. Economics is just some specialized language having to do with value. It’s given some kind of mystical significance, but its no less fallible than any other type of language. You can lie to yourself with economics just as easily as you can with spoken word.
When deer overgraze their habitat and starve, they’re not behaving any more innocently than humans. They just don’t have a fancy langiage to reassure themselves that its someone elses fault that theyre getting hungry.
I think this illusion about our powers is the most tragic part of this: we mostly believe we have the willpower to do better, it’s just the inconvenience of someone else doing it wrong that keeps us from doing it right…
I disagree. Deer don’t know any better. Humans are not only capable of understanding the consequences but are capable of habitat destruction on a global scale. Though to be clear, I’m not really concerned about our innocence or lack thereof. Just whether there’s a viable pathway whereby we minimize the ongoing Holocene extinction and don’t render or habitat so toxic human civilization collapses. Other than its use in identifying levers of change, assigning blame is beside my point. You can’t eat guilt.
It’s never that simple. It’s neither us nor someone else alone; it’s both together. Willpower is a word I find of limited use in this large a context. I’m much more interested in incentive structures. I don’t know that there’s a viable pathway where we don’t immolate, but I also don’t know that there isn’t and I’m not going to fatalistically give up simply because none are apparent or easy. YMMV.
…Which is why I try to emphasize glitches in the way we think, rather than just shrug it off to bad brains. There’s nothing inevitable about this way of doing it, it’s just not fashionable to talk about alternatives.
My hope is future humans will figure out hw to make use of all the stuff we throw away. Some sort of magical-to-us technology that takes plastic and reconfigures it for something useful. Or converts all the nuclear waste into useful energy.
Garbage pits will be mined for all the good stuff, and the miners will shake their heads at how we just threw it all away.
Or make these items extra-cost items? 10 cents for a straw. 50 cents for plastic cutlery. Sure, there will be complaints. Too bad.
IMHO the only way to change habits is to make people pay. I note that most people where I live now use reusable cloth bags for groceries. I believe this only happened because retailers were forced to charge 10 cents a bag.
