Maybe get rid of those billionaires and capitalists first before trying to survive on scraps. Nearly half of the food in grocery stores is thrown out while it’s still good. Meanwhile people are now starving and there’s even a return of scurvy due to malnutrition from food inflation and food insecurity.
Same with clothing. Companies like H&M shredding good clothes before throwing them out instead of giving it away or even selling them to places like Winners.
It’s light were living in a global version of the Irish famine where everybody was starving and dirt poor, but they were making a fuck ton of food for the British.
And finally, what about how companies are doing programmed obsoletion of their products like electronics and appliances and design their products in a way that produces more e-waste? Or how everything is wrapped in plastic all the time? How is that the consumer’s fault?
Change needs to start at the top. Cut the greedy fuckers out of the loop and you’ll see how much waste we can reduce.
If you actually read the article, instead of just complained about what you presume the article contains, you would have found that it agrees with you on pretty much everything. It even gives some examples on laws and actions by different governments, which try to solve or at least help with those problems. Not perfect, but certainly a good place to start.
The irritable finger-pointing is not very constructive. As you say, we mostly agree on the basics here.
As a plan, “cutting out the greedy fuckers” may sound satisfying but it’s a bit of a dead end unless you really are advocating some kind of bloody revolution. And in that case history shows with 100% confidence that, alongside all the misery and suffering, you will just end up with another bunch of greedy fuckers at the top.
The problem is humanity. It’s not them, it’s us. Unfortunately there’s no quick fix for that.
What a load of bootlicking nonsense.
I dunno man. If you look at aboriginal peoples around the globe who still live by their old native ways like in the Amazons, in isolated parts of Asia, Africa and Australia, and how American natives used to live, I’d say they were doing pretty well before western colonization happened. Greedy fuckers would get put in their place pretty quick or cast out of their collectivity for having antisocial behavior that is typically associated with greedy people.
The greed that we know today, historically speaking, is fairly recent. With its money and loans and debt and accumulation of wealth.
So no. I disagree with your argument that it is a problem with humanity. It’s a problem with a system that’s been built over time by a small group of people who were craving power.
Your analysis is certainly pretty easy on you personally, though, isn’t it? Someone else is to blame, move on. Whenever you take part in modern society - eating meat, driving and flying, buying junk and throwing it away, everything basically - it’s someone else’s fault, move on. Personally I choose to accept that I also have some responsibility in the matter.
As for the virtuous-native argument, I don’t buy that either. For one reason: population growth. A human civilization can never be sustainable unless its population is stable. It’s just basic ecology. Well, AFAIK, there is no premodern human society that has mastered this. Their populations are all increasing, just from a lower baseline, since they haven’t adopted farming yet. Their impacts may be lower because the absolute numbers are lower, but the trajectory is exactly the same. I know that’s not a popular opinion among the race-obsessed modern American left, but I’m a universalist so that’s how I see it. The color of people’s skin does not exempt them from responsibility. We’re all humans, we’re all implicated in this endeavor.
Jared Diamond’s book Collapse contains an anecdote which is a possible caveat. Apparently some of the premodern societies of the New Guinea Highlands have, in fact, mastered birth control and so managed to stabilize their populations. But AFAIK this is very much an exception. Even if one believes that premodern society - without proper healthcare, mostly patriarchal, often violent - is superior to ours, one still has to contend with the population issue. Humans in my view are all the same. We all want the same thing, we’re just progressing at different speeds towards the same reckoning.
And the people most amenable to it probably already need a bit more.
