Rebecca, today I am feeling somewhat pessimistic. The business about plastics- treaties, clean up, mitigation, manufacture heightens my bad mood. Why should it? Because people, even perfectly informed on a topic, will often disregard the Information. We all know plastics are in general badbfor the environment but we still insist on buying our myriad plastic products from picnic forks to shower curtains to inflatable lawn Santas. We know fossil fuels are bad but we still insist on our gasoline cars and lawnmowers and leaf blowers. We know that regulatory agencies like the EPA are valuable, but we still insist on electing governments that will hamstring or abolish them outright. The tragedy is that people will almost always choose self-interest over the public or global good. Unless compelled- but compulsion, some libertarians would argue, is a form of tyranny. It is not that we are short-sighted, dim-witted or irrational; we perfectly well know what we are doing.
If it continues like this we're on the road to a wrecked planet, hence my pessimism today.
Hey, Rebecca and Michael, know that you are not alone, nor am I. I live in Marietta, Ohio, next to the 100K+ac. Wayne National Forest, where no uncut native forest still can be found and where 6,000 abandoned oil/gas wells continue to leak methane. Just down the Ohio River are numerous petrochemical cracking plants producing the constituent chemicals for plastics. No evidence of any local concern about any of this. The fracking chemical semis ply the local through highways and I have to wear orange clothing when I walk down to the Muskingum River, where I can see the occasional avian cousin along that flyway. We are already living on a "wrecked planet", and we are willfully ignorant, as is the anti-environment incoming Federal administration.
Thank you for the informative writing and work you do! Having never heard of the swale paintbrush, I am happy that I both know about it now, and that it will be protected.
It is overwhelming to consider such issues "here on Earth" as you so poignantly put it. But we must whelm up! I've wrestled with the conflict between individual freedom and the greater good. Problems like waste pollution have to be the individual's concern mainly because that is the only way to build support for the coercion that is unavoidable. Your room mate can abstain from using plastic straws, but that will make half an infinitesimal effect on pollution. We have to come together and make commerce stop doing things that are destroying everything "here on Earth."
Rebecca, today I am feeling somewhat pessimistic. The business about plastics- treaties, clean up, mitigation, manufacture heightens my bad mood. Why should it? Because people, even perfectly informed on a topic, will often disregard the Information. We all know plastics are in general badbfor the environment but we still insist on buying our myriad plastic products from picnic forks to shower curtains to inflatable lawn Santas. We know fossil fuels are bad but we still insist on our gasoline cars and lawnmowers and leaf blowers. We know that regulatory agencies like the EPA are valuable, but we still insist on electing governments that will hamstring or abolish them outright. The tragedy is that people will almost always choose self-interest over the public or global good. Unless compelled- but compulsion, some libertarians would argue, is a form of tyranny. It is not that we are short-sighted, dim-witted or irrational; we perfectly well know what we are doing.
If it continues like this we're on the road to a wrecked planet, hence my pessimism today.
Hey, Rebecca and Michael, know that you are not alone, nor am I. I live in Marietta, Ohio, next to the 100K+ac. Wayne National Forest, where no uncut native forest still can be found and where 6,000 abandoned oil/gas wells continue to leak methane. Just down the Ohio River are numerous petrochemical cracking plants producing the constituent chemicals for plastics. No evidence of any local concern about any of this. The fracking chemical semis ply the local through highways and I have to wear orange clothing when I walk down to the Muskingum River, where I can see the occasional avian cousin along that flyway. We are already living on a "wrecked planet", and we are willfully ignorant, as is the anti-environment incoming Federal administration.
Very nice to hear from you Gregg! Hope you are well
Thank you for the informative writing and work you do! Having never heard of the swale paintbrush, I am happy that I both know about it now, and that it will be protected.
You are so welcome! I’d never heard of the swale paintbrush either.
It is overwhelming to consider such issues "here on Earth" as you so poignantly put it. But we must whelm up! I've wrestled with the conflict between individual freedom and the greater good. Problems like waste pollution have to be the individual's concern mainly because that is the only way to build support for the coercion that is unavoidable. Your room mate can abstain from using plastic straws, but that will make half an infinitesimal effect on pollution. We have to come together and make commerce stop doing things that are destroying everything "here on Earth."