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We can disagree about who flies more, lacking any data.
On emissions, my point was "not just emissions." Land usage and ecosystem protection are also huge. But yeah, flying isn't something I can do often in good conscience.
We can disagree about who flies more, lacking any data.
On emissions, my point was "not just emissions." Land usage and ecosystem protection are also huge. But yeah, flying isn't something I can do often in good conscience.
Agreed. I think land use and ecosystem protection is more important than emission reduction. The most obvious solution is not to have as much stuff that required resource extraction that took up land.
Beyond that though, one thing I've come to realize is it's important where a person is as well. Humans can live in places many other species cannot through irrigation, transportation, heating etc.
On one hand minimalism would say people should live where they use the absolute least and grow everything in their backyard. The problem with that is those locations where that's possible overlap pretty directly with biodiversity hotspots. Given that people don't 100% grow local anyways, it's actually better to use a little more resources and NOT live near the hotspots to preserve them than to use the absolute minimum.
A great example of this is the Piedmont of the Appalachians in the US. Ecologically, it would be better to throw new development in New Mexico or Missouri and chew up less productive land there than it would be to build more Atlanta suburbs. Even though the Atlanta suburbs could use more local food and heat / cool less, preventing subtropical rainforest forests from regrowing is worse than using more resources.
This reasoning is part of why I decided not to live in Appalachia or Southern Oregon when I had the ability to live anywhere being remote. Since I wanted a house, I want to live in an area where my chewed up habitat is just pinon / sagebrush.
When I lived in Idaho, and my dad worked for the BLM, I learned to value sagebrush as an ecosystem worth keeping...though not as energetically as forests and wetlands.
When I lived in Idaho, and my dad worked for the BLM, I learned to value sagebrush as an ecosystem worth keeping...though not as energetically as forests and wetlands.
Oh there is life everywhere! It's surprising what can live in something that looks barren. But it's not the density of a forest, and there's a LOT of sagebrush that that's essentially wilderness intact. They coyotes still wonder through the yard and birds sit on the roof, so they don't seem to mind me being there too much
Well, it depends. If you live in Hawaii, building a small home or a big one will make little to no difference in energy consumption because you really don't need to heat or cool it unless you live up slope. But then you have to figure in the energy needed to get goods to you. It makes more sense to go large w/ that. You can put 1 eBike or 1 of anything on a ship from China, or you can put 1,000, the energy needed to get them to a buyer is essentially the same.
But in other cases it makes more sense to have a DIY attitude. A backyard garden beats buying pesticide laden veggies and fruit which also need to be trucked to your location. That trucking involves even more pollution, and just building a truck means a lot of very polluting things which happen to the planet. A set of solar panels can save you a lot of money IF your utility thief, oops, I mean power supplier allows you to avoid hooking it into their grid. If they don't allow that, who you gonna trust on that monthly bill? Chickens in the backyard? Again, a great way to avoid shipping and the factory hen thing.
You can get your clothes and all manner of cool stuff from yard sales and thrift stores, and save a lot of wasteful production and pollution that's involved in the making of new goods and the shipping of those goods. Thinking of using a city's recycling bins? Figure in the pollution involved in the production and use of that truck that picks the bins up, the manufacturing of those bins, the gas the employees need to get to their truck, and on and on. It's a closed system, someone needs to pay the piper for everything. You see this done well in Hawaii: catchment systems for water, solar cells and batteries for power, home gardens for food, etc. But you can't do this in Detroit.
Last edited by stephenMM; 01-16-2024 at 01:12 PM..
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