If anyone cares about a 50 year olds opinion, I’ve been hearing warnings about the environment since I was a kid, including in things published before I was born. This is only news to people who didn’t want to know.
We also managed to address some of the easier problems, like DDT killing off birds, CFCs causing ozone depletion, and sulfates causing acid rain (regional fixes, not global)
Yep! Me too (as a near 40 year old). When I was young (90s/00s), I went to many youth meetings about what can be done, hearing from prominent activists and politicians, and even then there was a degree of fear about where things were heading. In my small circle I even started trying to give a little talk about the basic science of it … as in “how do we know climate change is caused by humans?” … a question that most then and probably now don’t know anything about.
In the end, it’s going to end up as our era’s or generation’s holocaust.
“How did you not know it was going to be this bad, the information was everywhere for ages?”
“Why didn’t you do something?”
“It doesn’t matter that no one else was doing anything, how could you not have done something?!”
And our answers, even amongst most of us who have done something will mostly be a “sorry” and a shrug, because we could have done more and we know our generation(s) were collectively dumb and that we will be remembered for this and our obnoxious looking concurrent consumerism (how many smartphones, new laptops, cars and flights have we all bought over the past 20yrs while not really doing anything?)
I’ve said it elsewhere … even amongst those who “believe” in climate change etc, there is I believe an endemic of “climate denialism”, not of its existence, but of the possibilities available to us to do something about this. Should a protest occur that is disruptive to traffic, there’ll sooner be a conversation about how that sort of protest doesn’t achieve much, from people who believe in a need to act mind you(!) than any conversation about what else could be done or whether simply joining in the protest would be the right thing to do … because the easiest way to remove the disruption of such a protest is to remove the need for the protest. Imagine if, instead of honking at the traffic, some people just got out of their car and joined in? How many need to do that before others get the picture?
