Edit: I wanted to apologize after reading some of the comments. You raise some legitimate points, I realize that there is a subtle malthusian element to this chart and some of you feel like a burden already. Furthermore, you raise a good point about corporate pollution, oil companies, and how their footprint is much greater than average plebs like us.
That’s 100% valid and I don’t disagree with you at all. My “compromise” I guess would be that continue to apply pressure and protest against large corporations, but in terms of ourselves, just pick a few things you can cut down on yourself, it does not have to be everything on this list.
For example, I really prefer having animal products in my diet, but I am willing to live in a small apartment , car-free, and not go on vacation much in my adulthood. In the same way, you guys can pick what you are comfortable with in reducing and what you do not want to compromise on.
All of us have different standards of living and we are flexible on some things, and some things we are not flexible. That is alright, just consider changing what you are comfortable with, but please do not think you are a burden. Your presence and your life is valuable to me. I don’t like to demoralize people.
except like 90% of recycling just goes in to landfill anyway.
And even if it didn’t, your personal waste would be dwarfed on comparison to the industrial pollution corporations and militaries produce.
But hey, keeping you recycling and feeling like you’ve done your part is a great way to make sure you don’t take aim at the root of the problem and those causing it.
Yes, my personal waste is dwarfed by waste of large organization…
Yes, the solution is in regulations and criminalization of polution by corporation.
But you should still recycle.
lol, no.
The solution is in abolishing capitalism and building a sustainable society that isn’t built on exploitation and oppression as well as the rape of the planet.
If you really want to, but you’re only serving your own ego, no one else, and definitely not the environment (because in the time you spend recycling, not to mention the time patting yourself on the back, and then the feeling like you’ve done your part so you don’t have to take any more action, the corporations running the plant let out another hundreds of times more pollution than you could ever recycle).
But hey, you get to tell yourself you helped, and that’s what really matters, right?
E: and just to be clear because I know how people love missing the point:
I’m not advocating you litter or pollute or make things deliberately worse, I am saying - spend your time doing something effective (fight capitalism, not its symptoms, build solidarity and community in whatever way you can and is beneficial locally) instead of wasting it to serve no real purpose.
From now on, I will spend the 2.5 seconds that it takes me to recycle on dismantling capitalism.