Or,
Why I Hate the "Environmental Movement".
This may seem exactly the opposite of what you would expect of me, being a biologist. In fact, in the past I would have called myself an environmentalist of various sorts. And maybe, once upon a time, there was a good reason to do so.
The truth is, as the title may suggest, I despise the environmentalist movement. These days, whenever I hear a cry of "save the earth!" or "environment" or various other passwords, I step away. And the simple reason is this: the environmental movement is nothing more than a bunch of political hacks with half assed ideas and no real objectives or means for change, a bunch of hypocritical poseurs. It's an excuse for people to do minor inconveniences that makes them feel self righteous so they can feel okay about the impending disaster, the "it's not my fault, I recycle!" crowd, the "I drive a hybrid" crowd, the "I cycle to work" crowd.
The clean air and clean water acts of the 70s were some truly monumental pieces of legislation. Rivers in this country no longer burn and you can actually eat fish out of Lake Eire now. Industries were required to filter their waste, both gaseous and aqueous. We have overall benefited immensely.
And then, it faltered. Somehow, doing something became equated with putting recycling out to the curb every Tuesday and buying organic produce. Human morality is a balancing act of canceling good versus bad. You can easily see this with people who desperately need to loose weight and explain having a doughnut with "I walked a couple blocks this morning". The total effect is zero progress.
If the whole point of such "environmental" actions is to create a sustainable human society, these little things that people do are overall meaningless and pointless in the grand scheme. Recycling makes little difference if West Virginia is still going to have it's mountain tops stripped into a heavy metal wasteland. Buying organic makes no difference when population still continues to shoot up (now nearing 7 billion) requiring more and more land for agriculture which will inevitably become desert. Riding a bike to work, while a nice healthy activity, does nothing to counteract the millions of drivers still on the roads and the immense amount of methane released by cattle flatulence. And the worst one, PLANTING a /TREE/ does absolutely nothing about the ongoing biodiversity crisis and the continuous slash and burn clear cutting of forestland in the tropics, where millions of species are facing extinction before I as a biologist even has time to describe them.
So fuck Earth Day, fuck organic farming, and fuck bike lanes. And for fuck sake, FUCK environmentalism, because it doesn't do shit. It's all just hypocritical nonsense.
Me, I'm still looking for answers, because sure as hell none of the above are addressing the larger problems.