What is progress?
I've been watching Michael Moore's documentary Planet of the Humans - which is free in full on YouTube.
Mainly it's about how there is no such thing as green energy. Nor any possibility of a technological fix. All that is denial so that we can go on with business as usual. In addition, I'm reading Richard Twine's The Climate Crisis and Other Animals, which I have only just started but which claims that unless we Western humans fix our damaged relationship with other animals, we will not be able to navigate our way from the current path to destruction.
The Moore doco shows a film from 1958 in which a scientist explains climate breakdown, caused by carbon dioxide emissions. That was before Silent Spring. 66 years ago. 66 years ago people knew what was coming - and few listened then and fewer listen now. It's too scary. It's invisible to most of us. It isn't hurting most of us. Not the privileged us. And the very privileged us can use it to make money - or just spend money to deny it and keep making more money by virtue of the fact that there are always more of us wanting more. Our emissions have increased not in line with population growth but exponentially, as other societies become consumers and desire what the West has had for decades. Likewise, the increase in meat consumption is less die to the increase in absolute numbers of humans but the increase in the view that meat is something desirable. The already privileged eat more meat and the newly privileged copy that new trend.
78% of all the agricultural land on the planet is used for meat - either plants to feed the animals or pasture for the animals. 78%. And it is inefficient. But it's capitalism.
So, as I consider breaking my rule against flying to attend events directed toward concern for the planet and for other species, how do I make that count?
I ask the trees and ask in the shamanic journeys but there is no clear answer. I ask my reason and I ask my emotions. I ask like-minded people, not that I really know many. My own cynicism at the efficacy of these messages, this information, makes the task harder. Because I don't believe we can change. Capitalism is the cancer, I think, and all of us have it. In the face of that behemoth, what chance is there for 800 year old pine trees? For the Antarctic wilderness? Even for the robins and the dunnocks, the foxes and the badgers. Capitalism sees them all as cheap. The don't matter in the market.
My ex-fiance said that I knew the value of everything and the price of nothing. Capitalism is the reverse.
Have bookmarked the link. Not up for watching it today!