If today's rising power generations who sneer at us boomers hadn't had us there, you wouldn't be watching eagles or defending wolves. There wouldn't be any.
We gave you OSHA, the EPA, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, thought we outlawed DDT -
Sorta did, here. A thread. https://twitter.com/Simspice1/status/1385343437524938753
2. Overall we failed, not because we didn't try, but because we thought we could cure a systemic failure with operations-level regulation.
That's how I got this weird. With the donkeys and all. The walking pace culture and society. Because - ecosystem death is a system output.
3. We failed because we thought we could make plastic, and make it illegal to throw it away, and everything would be hunky dory.
Once you make it you're stuck with it.
We went to war against the Detroit Gas Guzzling Monsters and drove fuel efficient cars.
For a while.
Some still.
4. Now y'all got the hots for electric cars and solar panels, and think you can cure the destruction caused by our high energy interaction with our home and only planet by sucking your energy directly out of the ecosystem, confident that the ecosystem won't mind.
Sun. Wind.
5. And you piss in our Post Toasties every morning before breakfast, and say, "You stupid greedy Boomers did this to Our Earth and you Knew Better!"
Yup.
Look around you.
Y'all are mostly in charge now. Most of you are still getting fucked.
That's how our generation worked.
6. Exactly how many Bill Gateses are there in my generation?
How many Jeff Bezoses in the next one after mine?
We've got a whole broken system. Yelling at each other isn't helping. In fact, it's part of the plan. Their plan.
7. Everybody knows, if they look at it, that Earth cannot sustain our level of activity, in which every day forever we pave a little more - it's a one way trip, we always pave, never restore and plant - we extract more energy bearing resources from the total available -
8. I seriously don't care what you power it with. Somebody look at the graphs of every single living thing on Earth which provides the non-dollar-denominated ecosystem services which make complex life on Earth possible, and tell me how we can continue to degrade that forever.
9. Most of America quietly looks down on people who directly interact with nature for other than academic purposes - not "farms", those are deserts, but some complex self-regulating ecosystem which provides food and fiber on a less than economic scale. Human-supporting nature.
10. Natural systems operate slowly. However, over time, each time there has been an event which took Earth back towards bare rock - over time, afterwards, life covered the whole thing with incredible wealth and complexity, capture carbon and energy from the ecosystem and wrapped
11. It into soils and biomes and it even, in its utter madness, evolved humans. This most recent time around.
Basically we have one choice: we can participate in that process by which nature and life create food, air, clean water, and capture energy which powers action.
12. We have entered a cycle in which our actions degrade the living system which makes everything possible. If you take a mental picture of, last year everything on Earth died except a tiny handful of incredibly tough organisms. Mostly Earth is barren. There used to be dinosaurs.
13. Observe that picture in your mind. A few life forms, but not many. But they survive, they breed, their children get all weird and move into whole separate niches and the picture gains complexity.
Thousands of generations pass, and pass again. The combined chemistry, carbon,
14. oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, except they've gotten tangled up at the molecular level, and there are carbonated hydrates and deoxyribonucleic acids, and more weird shit than you can shake a stick at, pick and eat, and in at least one of our legends that place was the Garden.
15. What we are doing now, and it can be and is being measured, is every single day we are moving Earth closer to the picture of what it looked like the morning after the dinosaurs died.
The energy of temperature in the atmosphere, which everyone is focused on, is just a piece.
16. Earth doesn't care by what means you power the step by step disassembly of the global ecosystem. When you get it down to a certain level it will undergo a drastic state change.
There is only one of these. We live inside it. It makes our lives possible. We can't take it apart.
17. I mean, we can take it apart. We are taking it apart. It can't be made to work that way.
18. If we are to solve this, we will have to reevaluate our relationship with speed and energy. We will have to reevaluate our relationship with material goods. Necessary possessions which serve us well and last our lifetimes. Then from there, mass production can't serve.
19. A well made animal powered mower will last two or more generations. Animals manufacture themselves. The same with a good hand drill. I can drill holes in steel with this drill. It would be an entirely different relationship with buying and selling.
Advertising wouldn't exist.
20. It is not possible to have a mass manufacturing society without a landfill crisis. They are all the same process.
The extraction of oil to turn into plastic and other forms of wasted matter and energy, the entire way humankind lives right now today, is all one thing.
21. And that's why we Boomers failed.
And the current noble plans for net zero by 2050 are going to make our failures look like a day at the park.
Happy #EarthDay
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