Let’s still not ban it though. I mean, it IS banned now, but also not. And the fact that massive insect populations started wholesale disappearing and never coming back - something even poison like DDT couldn’t pull off- after introduction of glyphosate is surely wholly irrelevant in this discourse anyway.
The decline of insects is the scariest thing I’ve seen in life, and I mean that. We kicked the bottom out of the food chain. It’s hard to state what I experienced as a child 40-50 years ago vs. now.
In just 3 years I’ve seen the insect population tank at my camp. My camp in the swamp. Banana spiders were legion, there’s still a few. The ground spiders are half what they were. Used to get a hummingbird now and again. Nothing has touched my feeders in 2 years. Further up the food chain, I see very little “higher” organisms. Nothing but squirrels, no other mammals. And that’s only 3 years.
Hell, my front porch is turning into a wasteland, and that’s on the bleeding edge of town, surrounded by country. Used to get as many a 5 tree frogs at a time, 0 now. 4-5 hummingbirds every year, now I rarely see 1. My porch lights used to be covered in dead bugs, pretty clean now and I haven’t touched them since last summer.
Young people have been robbed of a world they don’t know existed. Robbed in ways that don’t make headlines.
I’m pretty sure I’m literally among the last few people alive who have seen live fireflies in our own country. That was some 40 years ago and I still miss them.
I actually saw firefly last summer and the year before flying around my neighborhood. I will say though, that I saw way less of the last year than the year before. It’s made me wonder if I’ll even see them at all this summer.
Fireflies are especially susceptible to pesticides (which includes herbicides). When I moved here 18 years ago, I’d see one or two occasionally, zero now. Read an article about them disappearing worldwide, over 10 years ago.
We didn’t have them when I was a kid in OK, but when I’d visit my great grandparents in Indianapolis, you could snatch as many as you liked out of the air, and that was smack in the middle of the city.
Growing up (90s), in the middle of a dense suburban/semi-urban area, my mom would melt holes into the top of peanut butter jars with an awl, and we’d put some grass and shit in them and fill them with dozens of fireflies to make fairy lanterns. She would let them out when we fell asleep and said the fairies only stay until dawn, which I was never up for.
I saw a firefly the other day and was absolutely thrilled. It’s been so so long since I’ve seen them. Then again it was during the day so it might have been something else…
To elaborate - Ecosia is basically just a frontend for Bing. They split the revenue from advertisements with Bing, and donate a portion of their share to a variety is charities to support tree planting initiatives
It looks like the most recent month’s revenue split was low on trees (16.6%), but looking back at previous months they tend to average in the 25% to projects range. I wouldn’t be surprised if the increase in March advertising spending was all Earth Month related.
If you don’t mind Bing, and you don’t mind ads, Ecosia is a fantastic way to make a little impact every day with something you’d be doing anyways. If you do mind those things, then consider donating to one or more of the charities Ecosia supports, because at minimum they have a better project vetting budget than I do.
All plant-based foods, whole-foods or not, have lower emissions than animal products
EDIT with a source:
Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits
[…]
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
How are people in this century not understanding that humans produce animals for consumption and that eating animals’ meat does not come from a magical apparition. We don’t eat cows that are out there, we create cows for you to eat (under 4 years)
But I like feeling like a real manly man when I eat my real manly meat in a real manly way with my real manly bros, surely that’s worth a few hundreds thousands human lives a year ?
(And btw, plant-based diets could also save 100 million animal lives a year)
I think it you want to see the environmental benefits, is less of saving animal lives and more ensuring that 100 million animals a year never exist?
Edit: Not sure what is controversial about this. We stop eating meat to stop farming of livestock. No livestock lives are saved, just new animals aren’t born into the mincer.
Its a great idea. I think it would be challenging to implement and would need quite a lot of domain expertise to really unpick. Need to have enough teeth to be able to assess whether level of action and emission mitigation is: above and beyond; in line with paris agreement needs; below needed but active work due to constraints; actively harmful company . E.g. some companies might be intrinsically high emitting because of their sector (e.g. steel manufacture) but doing all they can to decarbonise whilst some might instead be “decarbonising” largely through accounting tricks like offsets and others still just bankrolling delay and denial. Assessing what a Paris Agreement compliant pathways for sub- and multi-national organisations is actually really tricky. Similarly tricky to assess what “as fast as possible” really is for the same organisations.
For finance sector I know this: bank.green which might help some.
green
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.