Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple-living activist, and you reduce this to zero. In 2005, per-capita municipal waste production (basically everything that’s put out at the curb) in the U.S. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.” Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well: “For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption - residential, by private car, and so on - is never more than about a quarter of all consumption the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government. They’re dying because the water is being stolen. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption - changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much - and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |