How hopeful or depressed are you about the future of the environment?

[More Than A Feeling]

10 being the most hopeful, 1 being the most depressed.

[swag]

1. Gee, I've been depressed since 1986 or so when I first read

the Worldwatch Institute's State of the World report.

I went out and got a vasectomy shortly thereafter, thereby doing something for the environment by not creating another human environmental disaster and ensuring that I wouldn't be partly responsible for delivering another sentient being into inevitable planetary misery.

[blues90]

2. It is depressing , not only that it will take years but

That we allowed it to go on so long . I hear there will be drastic effects still to come for years even if we began today to cut the carbon output .

also in as weak of an economy as we have how will the lower than middle class even purchase a new efficient car when they can barely make it as is and many losing their homes . add it the water needed to produce crops and the fuel for biofuels to be made seems like a impossible feat .

We changed from leaded fuels to a none lead fuel years ago and who even knows what the effects of these lead replacements will do , it's like the freon which used to be R-12 which destroyed the O-zone to R-134 , what effects will R-134 have , none of these chemical compounds are without some effect . It's a trade off and we don't even know what the lesser of the two evils are .

[Annces]

3. I am not sure how to answer

We are damaging the environment and it will not recover in our lifetimes. However maybe future generations will learn to take care of the Earth. I think humankind will survive, unless we are a limited experiment here on Earth?

[Up2Late]

4. I'd say 3, because our current Bush nightmare is almost over...

...I doubt things will get much worst once he's gone, or at least I hope it doesn't.

[Gregorian]

5. It's going to take sacrifice.

Or that of future generations. You can guess which one will happen.


There is a major shift of thinking which must occur for things to change. And it's not one that anyone is talking about. It's not "doing", but "not doing" that is going to solve the problem.

We are not going to engineer our way out of this. No Prius, no lightbulb, no photovoltaics. Perhaps in 100 years those things will start to make a difference. But we don't have that. It's about not having children. Not driving. Not traveling. And it's hugely threatening to every thing and every way of life people are used to.

Edit- If you understand exponentials, and you look at the population curve, you will see the extreme danger we're in. For all of eternity, that curve was horizontal. It's vertical now. And we are skyrocketing.

India and China. There are nearly a million new cars being produced for these countries. A million new drivers. Just for starters. It ain't good.

[blues90]

10. I agree in large part it is about population control

There is no real need to keep a family name going if the world can't sustain their lifes and it can't .

The way things are now don't people ever look around and see the masses of people and cars or are they blind to it ?

[BrklynLib at work]

6. I cannot believe that I STILL hear people that I thought were somewhat intelligent denying the

existence of global warming. They are spouting that crap about sunspots..or the fact that global cooling was a big issue in the 70's....totally unaware that the "global cooling" theory was disproved...or actually never really accepted by anyone of any scientific importance.

"But there was an article in Newsweek in 1975!!!!"

Of course this person never bothered to find the apology for that article and the admission that it was totally incorrect.

[Gregorian]

7. Two of my close friends are mechanical engineers. And they don't trust the facts.

Oh, the facts are not guaranteed to be correct. Or it's just another ice age.

It depends on where they are collecting their facts. Some people just pick facts to justify their position.

I was even lectured by one of them the other day about how five minutes of a weed wacker produces more "something" than a car going from San Francisco to Los Angeles five times. I mean, that's a total no-brainer. I didn't even know what he was talking about. All I could conjecture is that it was some obscure study that was referring to the 2-stroke additive or something.

Weird.

And so you see, even if we were all on the same page, the problem would require sacrifice that literally no one is willing to make.

I do not see this ending well. But I do see a scenario where it gets so bad that people will just survive, and then the future of earth will slowly begin to change and recover however it can.

And then the bottom line is we really don't know what will actually happen. I'm open minded. I'd like to think there are mechanisms the planet has that will begin to show themselves. Who knows...


Edit- And sorry for blabbing and tacking this onto your post. I think the best solution in an insane world is to try and laugh. I may be a hell-a serious guy, but I do laugh.

[BrklynLib at work]

9. I think I am starting to agree with Kurt Vonnegut Jr. He said that Mother Earth just perceives

mankind as some undesirable virus as a result of our behaviour, and she is doing her best to rid herself of us...Sadly, the planet may sruvive...not so true of its inhabitants.

It is astounding how many people do not seem to care about the continuance of our existence on this planet..

[Lilith Velkor]

12. We still get idiots trying to blame it on farting cows.

This while they get all self-righteous about wearing coats and shoes made out of petroleum products...

We're fucked, I tell ya, fucking fucked.

[cosmik debris]

8. The Industrial Revolution is over two hundred years old

It will not be corrected in my lifetime. And maybe not ever. Amen.

[CrispyQ]

11. I think Mother Nature is going to knock us down a peg or two.

We think that 'we create our own reality,' that we can extract ourselves from nature. We're going to find out how foolish that way of thinking is.

I often hear that people think the planet is too big for us little ole' humans to impact. Stunning, just stunning. I always ask them if they remember the power of exponents from 8th grade math. Sadly, most people don't even know what I'm talking about.

Here's a little graphic I clipped out of a Parade Magazine years ago. My apologies that it isn't more clear. It accompanied an article by Carl Sagan about the power of exponents.



To count the current human population on Earth would take over 200 years. ~~Gasp.

[Raine]

13. Hopeless

is what Iam. :-(

[Odin2005]

14. 3 in the short term (next 25 to 50 years), 8 in the long haul.

We will eventually become technologically advanced enough to be a totally environmentally sustainable, yet high-tech society. My main fear is over what horrors we will have to endure before we get there.

[SmokingJacket]

15. I don't know why, but I feel positive.

I think we're going to start turning things around, and the kids of the next generation will finish the job.

Our grandchildren will be like, "What?? You bought cheese wrapped in PLASTIC and threw it away, and then it ended up in the OCEAN? What, didn't you people THINK???"

And I'll have to blush and say, "I tried! I did my best!"

Things will probably get worse before they get better, though...

[maxsolomon]

16. there will be no action until it is too late

by the way, soylent green is people.

[H2O Man]

17. The environment

will be fine. People may cease to exist, and we may take other species with us, however.

[More Than A Feeling]

18. Technically, you might be right, but you know what I meant. n/t

[blues90]

19. People have already taken alot of species off the planet

Man will eventually go too but not before man destroys much more of nature .

I have seen 50 years (since I was an 8 year old) of how much damage just one new neighborhood could do when people ignore nature .

People back then seemed to think all the earth was a dumping ground with no idea or reguard for nature .

I recall a Jr High I went to in 1962 that had a clear small creek running behind it on the border of a wooded area . There was all sorts of water life in this creek , Crawfish , fish , frogs and tadpoles , the occasional turtle , salamanders and newts .

One day they decided to pump some new pipe holding the water from clothes washers into the far end of the creek , killed everything . Even many years later I visited the creek and it was dry green crust and never returned .

They used a crane to drag a very large wild farm pond to make a park and killed everything in the process and to this day , some 45 years later it is still lifeless . People would not listen to the protests and said we are just cleaning the bottom , well they certainly did that , the entire balance and eco system was destroyed which took god knows how many decades to reach a balance .

While they did this every creature capable of breathing air and walking such as turtles and amphibians tried to escape , most were crushed on the small highway that ran next to this pond .

These are just small examples of much larger damage being done today .

[MrSlayer]

20. Right in the middle.

I'm neither hopeful nor depressed about it.

[warren pease]

21. I'm a 1 and here's one small reason why...

According to Jared Diamond in his book "Collapse," if the Chinese achieve a first-world lifestyle -- which seems reasonably likely -- their combined resource use and environmental impact would be as if the world's population had approximately doubled to 12 million people. And that's the case even if population and production/consumption rates everywhere else remained unchanged.

And China isn't alone in reaching for the first world lifestyle. India, with more than a billion people, is moving rapidly in that direction as well. So is Indonesia, and probably a dozen other densely populated countries. And who the hell are we to tell them they can't pursue that path, icons of environmental awareness that we are?

So on those numbers alone, it's pretty hard to be optimistic about the prospects for a stable planetary human population and sustainable production/consumption levels.

Unfortunately, we'll take a hell of a lot of innocents down with us -- mammals, fish, birds, plants. Germs and bugs will thrive, though, since they love heat and humidity.

O brave new world.


wp