Conservation and the environment

[Sarah]

Oh, my meat ain't cheap, erika, but, poor though I am, I lead such a narrow life that I can afford the extravagance (working at home and living within walking distance of most necessities helps quite a bit; plus a generally reclusive bent). My big regret is that I can't feed my animals the same holy meat--and their consumption is much greater than mine.  But I've already bored everyone on that score, so I won't go into details.

JJ, shirts made with child labor just clean better, don't you find?

[masterofsparks]

I also have tried to stop using paper towels for cleaning and I use cut up t-shirts instead. They make perfect rags. (Socks are good if you need something absorbent.)

why not use an actual rag?

They go for like 2 cents at Pep Boys.

Yeah but that produces more waste. If I use something I already have then I'm not producing more stuff, right? (What is up with you guys and the rags? Didn't you ever use old t-shirts or sheets to clean stuff up?)

To be fair, I've never actually set foot in a Pep Boys. I'm passing along a price quoted by Chet from Gene Simmons Toyota. He had to buy his son a rag for Christmas because Tom refused to purchase a car, so I'm assuming he price-shopped to get the best deal.

[Sarah]

Boy, if I gave up making french fries and bacon, I'd use no paper towels at all.  I really should just use newspaper (my sole source being the grocery store flyer I get weekly) and thumb my nose at the ink.  I mean, I don't even bother to wash most of my produce (my father said of me about twenty years ago that I have a suicidal approach to food preparation/consumption), so what am I being squeamish about? 

(Sorry to babble, but I'm listening to SSD right now, and this is helping to pass the time.)

[dania]

I tend to forget to bring my own grocery bags to the store

Sometimes I forget too.  Only in the last few months have I been continually remembering to bring them.  Other times, I have them with me and I forget to tell the cashier I don't need one.  Then there's that nominally awkward moment after I say "oh, I don't need a bag," and they have to take the extra step away from their routine to take the item(s) out of the plastic bag (or sometimes bags if they decide that a bottle of sunscreen definitely needs 2 bags). 
Recently I had a little moment of joy where the lady of front of me was still getting ready to leave, and the cashier started ringing me up.  I said "I don't need a bag" and then the lady in front of me decided to do the same after a moment of fidgeting with her stuff. 
I was like, "Good choice!" and then immediately felt nerdy and weird for saying so. 

[John Junk 2.0]

I like to buy a brand new shirt at WalMart and rip it up for rags.  When the rags get dirty I throw them out and buy some more shirts.  These shirts are really cheap!  Like $10.  I like WalMart because of the competitive pricing. 

[Sarah]

In my little town, my sisters and I are about the only people who use their own bags regularly (the cashiers love us, because it means we do our own bagging).  But recently I went to a larger grocery store and was very pleased to see a number of people using their own cloth bags.  Still remarkably few, however, considering how they started being pushed so heavily beginning with the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day almost twenty years ago.

[yesno]

I always have a shortage of plastic bags.  Not only do I need the ones from the store, but I need to steal them from other people.  Dog poop.

[jed]

Here's a consumption v. humanity-loving dilemma I have all of the time:

When walking down the sidewalk and some sad person is handing out fliers do you take them out of pity for the person getting payed garbage to stand in the heat or freezing cold for next to nothing (I have had friends who have done this for temp agencies between jobs and they say it is really pretty awful) or do you refuse to accept out of love for trees and hatred of commercialism.  I usually refuse but I know these people have to hand them all out before they can check out. What to do? 

[Bryan]

Then there was another revelation:  Apparently, for us to prevent the world from ending each of our carbon footprints should not exceed 2,000 metric tons, whereas even the holy, self-abnegating student's was 2,500--to which another 5,000 tons was automatically added because of all the services supplied in an industrialized nation.  So no matter how good any in this case British individual is, there's no hope in hell.

Now, obviously, one piece of BBC fluff does not count as incontrovertible evidence, but there's a lot of other doomsaying out there that claims much the same, so, when you come down to it, anything we do is just ever-so-slightly delaying the inevitable.  That said, I of course we should all do as much as we can.

When you come down to it, the Church of Euthanasia is on the right track.

I've read stuff like this, too. One of the things I took from it is the fact that, yes, we should all behave responsibly and make the right consumer choices, but there's a lot that we can't do simply by making consumer choices. And this means we need government to act, through regulating business and through creating infrastructure, to make it possible for us to radically reduce our ecological/carbon footprints.

A lot of the big things that our society needs to do will not be terribly profitable to private interests, and therefore will not happen, or will be slow to happen via private industry. However, they are necessary for the public interest. Convincing people to consume less doesn't fit well with our current economic model.

It's a big problem.

[Sarah]

It's a big problem.

Yes.  And what a gentle way to put it.

I'm just glad I have no children.

[JonFromMaplewood]

I'm just glad I have no children.

Ugh. I have no idea what to tell my kids about this.

[John Junk 2.0]

Maybe the earth will get lucky and we'll all die in a plague.

[Sarah]

But a nice painless one, please.  For the children (and me).

[erika]

I want to make babies and go to europe (not in that order) before this whole thing is over so if it could hold out for another dozen years or so I'd really appreciate it.

[Sarah]

Only a dozen?  But what about those babies you make?