Hi
This is a thread devoted to keeping things green and eco friendly. It is not as hard as everyone thinks it is and it has a lot more benefits than the obvious. And the reason I am pro-going-green isn't for the animals (though I am for saving them). I do it because I care about humanity. There are a lot of benefits for the human race to be eco conscious and the biggest one is health. When I stopped using harmful chemicals to clean my home and used baking soda in place of air fresheners and sprays, I stopped coughing and such. The fumes were now gone! That I saved money lol.
So how do you go green no matter how small it is? Or do you have green news to share?
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
The Green Thread!
I compost my food and lawn waste. We mix that with the rabbit berries and use it for small scale gardening, corn and veggies.
I do some carpentry as a hobby, and almost all of it is reclaimed wood. A lot of wood gets thrown right into the dump, and some of it has some pretty gnarly chemicals in it.
I live in a camper, so most of my living space is geared toward efficiency whether or not I intend it. My space heater is set to 62, because I find it comfortable. I leave my water pump and water heater off until it is needed (so no background electricity/propane use). I am thrifty with water since I have to manually refill my tank when I run out. I also hate driving (bit of a phobia) so I walk when it's feasible.
Oh, and I have pet rats, so I never have to throw out food or bones. They get first go at it. They shred cardboard boxes too, so that probably reduces a bit of waste.
(And I guess just living in 250 square feet also means reduced land use and reduced heating/cooling and cleaning products. It takes maybe an hour to scrub literally every surface and appliance.)
I don't do near what I used to… I used to be rather gung ho and preachy about protecting the earth, recycling, etc… And while I do think we shouldn't flippantly abuse the environment, I guess I'm a little pessimistic that any of the 'little things' we try to do really do any good, that they really just vain attempts to make ourselves feel better…
IMO, the only thing that will truly work is for the human population has to be cut by about 80%, and the most modern tech has be done away with… And since I don't plan on becoming a genocidal Luddite dictator, I don't see where there's much I can do to really help… The little stuff is like draining a river with a bucket… Sure, maybe if we could convince all 7+ Billion of us to do it… but I don't see it happening.
But, I also don't really think humanity has the power to destroy the world either, like some think we do. The world is much more resilient than we are, and eventually we're going to back ourselves into a corner, population and resource wise, and a great cataclysm is going to become the genocidal dictator. A big reset will come… eventually. But most life will still live, just us humans, and maybe larger creatures are in trouble..
But not all humans will die, and other life surely not. Life will slowly recover, and we'll probably repeat this cycle again in a couple millennia…
Strangely enough, this doesn't depress me (save when I think about my descendants maybe not making it). I see it as sort of inevitable, both the cataclysm and recovery!!
KimLuster wrote:
I don't do near what I used to… I used to be rather gung ho and preachy about protecting the earth, recycling, etc… And while I do think we shouldn't flippantly abuse the environment, I guess I'm a little pessimistic that any of the 'little things' we try to do really do any good, that they really just vain attempts to make ourselves feel better…
IMO, the only thing that will truly work is for the human population has to be cut by about 80%, and the most modern tech has be done away with… And since I don't plan on becoming a genocidal Luddite dictator, I don't see where there's much I can do to really help… The little stuff is like draining a river with a bucket… Sure, maybe if we could convince all 7+ Billion of us to do it… but I don't see it happening.
But, I also don't really think humanity has the power to destroy the world either, like some think we do. The world is much more resilient than we are, and eventually we're going to back ourselves into a corner, population and resource wise, and a great cataclysm is going to become the genocidal dictator. A big reset will come… eventually. But most life will still live, just us humans, and maybe larger creatures are in trouble..
But not all humans will die, and other life surely not. Life will slowly recover, and we'll probably repeat this cycle again in a couple millennia…
Strangely enough, this doesn't depress me (save when I think about my descendants maybe not making it). I see it as sort of inevitable, both the cataclysm and recovery!!
From the scientific POV, I accept that someday, we won't be the dominant species, but I think that's going to be a long time from now and that's definitely a topic for another thread lol. It is an interesting debate though.
However, I am not a nihilist and I don't believe it is in our nature to be destructive. The fact that we can feel remorse, love and be emotional is proof of that. What can I say? I'm hopeful. That and I firmly believe in doing what you can while you're still on Earth. Nobody has to be a saint. Just a good person.
@KimLuster: I think George Carlin put it best: "The planet is fine. The people are fucked!"
https://youtu.be/ovbF0D2wySI
The problem is when you take too long a view: You zoom out too far and miss what really matters.
1. Being responsible about environmental concerns helps humans, as El Cid hints. The planet will be here just the same a billion years from now but we won't. We need to take care of this environment for ourselves.
We can't be like young children causing a mess in their parent's house and using up all the toilet paper because we think it'll all just be magically replaced.
We're the adults here. If the stuff is destroyed or used up it's us who have to clean it up, or else sit stewing in a pile of our own shit.
2. It's not really always about a "global environment", often it's about your immediate environment.
When I was in Cambodia I was shocked to see massive piles of rubbish on the streets of Phnom Penh. They just didn't have the local government systems and infrastructure in place to supply bins and remove rubbish on the streets of their capital city! This isn't some backwater place that was just set up 50 years ago, no, this is a modern, up to date city, yet it's been around since before the USA existed.
And it's not just the capital either! All the little rural towns have the same issue as well as the isolated homes in the country: throw all your rubbish in the drainage gutter in front of your house…
On a community level they need to campaign and vote in people who will have a platform to deal with that stuff.
On a personal level they need to take better responsibility for the rubbish that they as individuals produce and where it goes. There's no reason it has to go in the drainage ditch in front of the house or even just dumped in a field 200 meters down the road…
That's just an example but it applies to us all.
Well hopefully there's an entrepreneur in Cambodia who'll set up a carting company. Recycling took off in the US because there was a lot of money to be made in reclamation as opposed to just dumping.
Just like there are tons of jobs in sampling. I work in a petroleum facility. Sampling is constant. Recycling is constant, waste is constant. They're building this new green power plant and the waste in construction is ridiculous. A huge tractor trailer for a pipe? And a dozen trucks from a dozen suppliers arriving every day with one box?
Car pooling and public transportation is a drop in the bucket. I could recycle all I want (And I have for more than 30 years) but one construction project will undo every thing I've personally accomplished in a decade in hours.
Then there's dirt. Okay we dig a hole and cart away the dirt. Then a few weeks later we have dozens of big diesel dump trucks bring back new dirt to fill the holes–
In the meantime, someone buy the city of Phonm Penh a garbage truck. Some places there's too little infrastructure and in others there's way too much.
Bravo illustrates my point perfectly. Let's be honest - everyone of us posting on this thread lives a 'western' life style. We probably have a home with heating and air conditioning, and very likely takes up much more land space than we really need. we get our food and clothing from big stores that require much more resources to stay in business. We have a car (or more than one), or we use public transportation, regularly…
In just the very act of living a western lifestyle, we (directly or indirectly) suck much more resources from the planet that we can ever hope to give back by recycling or conserving. We can say we're cutting back, but the only way to cut back enough where it really makes a difference is to basically become non-tech hunter/gatherers again…
And there ain't none of us gonna do that! All the billions of us!
Worse, more and more 3rd world peoples are joining us 'western life stylers' every day. Industry and infrastructure keeps spreading. More forests get cleared. Oceans get overfished.
I agree that we're no inherently destructive. It's just that we're not really hardwired to think beyond our current territory (where we live and what we can see…) We all want to not just survive, but to prosper, individually, and to give up some of our comfort and resources to make life better for some faceless someone in a foreign land, or some future person…
Like I said - we're not gonna do it. Not until we have no choice! Not until nature has butch-slapped us down but good!!
edit: yeah, maybe I sound kinda Debbie Downer… So look, just because I'm a bit pessimistic about all 7-billion of us being able to continue to live like we are doesn't mean I think we shouldn't try to take care of where we live, but it's more like taking care of your home. Just because we're all going to eventually die doesn't mean there's no merit in keeping our houses and neighborhood clean and pleasing to the eye (don't sh!t where you sleep). For aesthetic reasons, that has value all on its own!
I'm constantly frustrated by how much packaging I have to throw away each week as a result of food shopping and the problem is getting worse, not better. I try to minimise it, but I'm fighting a losing battle and a lot of it seems to be about making stuff look better than, or more than it really is.
It's frustrating, but sooner or later the robots will be the dominant species and then they'll either wipe us out, or make us all buy loose vegetables again.
To be perfectly honest, I don't make enough money to make consciously "green" choices. I have to make "cheap" choices. Some of those end up being "green," but that's a coincidence. I reuse everything and am really efficient about food purchases and use. I minimize water, electricity, and propane use because it's expensive. I would be nice to have the luxury to choose, but I don't.
On the other hand, maybe if I ever have a proper adult income, I'll have settled into good habits of a frugal lifestyle.
Of course though all the horrible repercussions of the Western lifestyle was predicted to have destroyed the world already. Just like the initial models for global warming indicated that coastal areas would be inundated by the first decade of the 21st century. They keep pushing back the dates and the models are shown to be seriously flawed (several thousand studies last year are knocking all kinds of holes but even science and evidence can't trump deeply held beliefs.)
We were also supposed to have killed off every animal species (yet we're discovering more unknown species) and run out of fossil fuels (the reserves keep getting bigger, not smaller because we keep finding ways to get petroleum that was once thought unobtainable)
And in the 1970s we were all told we were heading into a new ice age. That evidence was actually never overturned, it might just be that human carbon emissions might be holding it off. A little global warming might be a good thing. But we really don't know as much about the environment as we would like to believe. We don't realize that extinction is the natural order of things. Species are supposed to disappear. If they didn't, trilobites would still rule the oceans and we would probably all be warm blooded dionosaur/ avians rather than mammals. I would so miss boobs. It'd all be about feathers.
Just some ruminations. The planet isn't in trouble, it's the humans who are fucked. ;)
We recycle a lot and try to reuse things as much as possible. We also have a compost bin for scraps of food and try to turn off any lights we're not using.
We also don't have a car so we use public transport a lot. As we're not in a drought at the moment we're not too worried about water. Once the season hits though we have tight water restrictions to follow as well.
So true Bravo, the 'crossing the Rubicon' moment for humans regarding nature, if we go by most current scientific opinions (and that's what they are, politics be damned…), is very near!!
But for all we really know it could be centuries away!! But, common sense tells us there is a line, that the current way of living for the masses of humanity (with its exponential increase) really cannot be sustained. Something will give, either next decade or 500+ years from now…
That something will probably be us! But who know, maybe with enough time we can change, or just will naturally (see the lowering of birth rates as we get more developed…)
There have been a few near civilization ending disasters. Evidence suggests that humans came near to extinction thousands of years ago. A series of disasters effectively ended Mediterranean Bronze Age culture. There have been disastrous ends to other human civilizations and resulting Dark Ages, why not one for our current global community?
Life will go on as it always does but not as comfortably and the First World has so much more to loose this time around. Humankind will go back to sustenance farming for a few thousand years and try another comeback.
It has happened before and might happen again. I personally think that we've even been this advanced before and lost it all, but I'll be long gone. But plastic being indestructible someone may discover one of my action figures and extrapolate a whole culture based on a fertility goddess named md'i'chin or l'rihs'ser'ed
I've read some of those theories suggesting we may have been very advanced technologically back in some near-myth age! Makes for some fascinating reading. Like Bigfoot, I mostly don't believe it but would be elated to discover it to be true!
Read something else interesting about plastic. Seems that while plastic won't biodegrade, with enough time it does break down some and mix with existing rock and sediment, etc, so in the very far future geologists might be extremely puzzled by this strange geological layer!
KimLuster wrote:It'll be mined as a fantastic resource to be melted down and formed into all kinds of useful items.
I've read some of those theories suggesting we may have been very advanced technologically back in some near-myth age! Makes for some fascinating reading. Like Bigfoot, I mostly don't believe it but would be elated to discover it to be true!
Read something else interesting about plastic. Seems that while plastic won't biodegrade, with enough time it does break down some and mix with existing rock and sediment, etc, so in the very far future geologists might be extremely puzzled by this strange geological layer!
After all according to George Carlin's routine quoted above it's why the planet had humans evolve; it wanted plastic.
Ok…
I am slightly worried as I write this because this week is proof that there is definitely climate change. Here in Canada, winter gets cold with lots of snow, but… this week, we had up to +9 weather in early January as well as rain and so much snow melted, you could see the grass a bit. Then, it was the second coming of the ice age.
THIS is why we need to take pollution more seriously. Every year, the damage rises more and more mainly in the air. This is why I stopped using aerosols to freshen up the air in my house and I narrowed down my cleaning sprays to two bottles: one homemade concoction and a watered down Windex-vinegar spray. Plus, I only use soap and liquid Vim. All this smoke, spray and chemicals go somewhere and then they come back and shoot us in the foot.
With that said, I am jumping for joy at the electric car being perfected so well that there are now electric buses. If all the cars got replaced, THAT alone would remove a large portion of air pollution.
What say you? Is anyone else experiencing the phenomena like this?
In Australia right now it's summer and we're having record high temperatures in most of the country.
On the South Western side where I live we're having a super unusually mild summer, the mildest I've ever known for this specific time of year when it's normally the hottest.
Today we have wind and rain!
So yes, it's most certainly climate change.
The weather travels East across the country here, so the Eastern states get the weather systems after they've acquired some extra heat energy from the vast dead heart in the desert centre of Australia, making them hotter.
Over here in the west we get everything first however.
The ocean currents that feed our weather systems here are a little cooler at the moment due to all the fresh cold water dumped into the oceans from the melting Icecap further south in Antarctica, giving us milder weather for the moment.
Tropical cyclones up north are coming down to give us a rain storm.
I read a great book on the history of the earth's atmosphere and climate. Basically it was about the shifting balance between greenhouse gases and oxygen. Climate change is real. The planet does it all the time going back billions of years. We have records barely two hundred years that are use for these models. If you go back around a thousand years the glaciers, the Arctic and Antarctica may have had less ice than they do today. As recently as 30,000 years ago Antarctica may have been ice free. (Something that is part of the world in my comic but it hasn't come up yet)
If you go back over geologic time it has been both much warmer and much colder. Our current civilisation has enjoyed a relatively mild period. But even that has had its ups and downs. After the Little Ice Age we may still be seeing rising temperatures. The studies used to "prove" manmade global warming aren't extensive enough and don't take a lot of that into account as the disciplines don't talk to each other much.
We may have nothing to very little to do with this and there's even less that we can probably do about it. We're seven billion very arrogant self important specks in a system that seems to love and favor beetles (yet more species identified last year.)
Gaia doesn't seem to care very much about humankind and it seems there's very little we can do to change her mind.
Paying attention to the records being broken by the mild and cold spells in the NE U.S it seems the mild records were set in the warmest decade of the 20th Century for U.S. weather (1930s) and the cold records were mostly set during the winter of 1917-1918 which was one of the coldest years of the Little Ice Age since about the 17th century.
What Bravo said! Like I said before, I used to be so gung-ho about all this, but now I see just so much politics in it…! Just a casual reading and it's easy to see climate has seesawed greatly over the eons. While we humans really should take better care of our home (ie. don't sh!t where you sleep), if the earth 'decides' it wants to get warmer or colder, there ain't much we can do about it!! Now I do believe we are (maybe) accelerating the current warming period, but I think even if we cut back in every way all the current politics says we should (which we're not gonna do) all we're doing is delaying the warming… It's coming no matter what, as a natural cycle, and I don't think we're accelerating it all that much… And yeah, I know what the 90% of scientist say… Most scientist buy into String Theory too - so much it's delayed true advancement in physics for decades! And you get shouted down and ostracized when you disagree in any way! Politics!
What we should be doing is using our human ingenuity to figure out how to survive the coming warming. We could totally survive it, even thrive, if we set our minds to that (we're really ingenious when we wanna be), but actually stopping warming - waste of time and resources!!
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