Thought Portal

how dare you question the amazing method of farming that gives us so much food by simply killing the soil and leaving lands barren without maintaining the resources that make it work in the first place.

last year i got 1800 bushels of corn by killing the soil, as opposed to before when i only got 1200 by not killing the soil. surely i can simply keep killing more soil

wym there's only so much soil. that's an externality and therefore none of my concern

well here's the thing, under normal circumstances without human intervention soil recovery can take a long long time. with human intervention, such as mulching, cover crops (that you then turn into mulch), seeding with beneficial fungi, etc, soil buildup can be massively boosted. we can be a positive force instead of a negative one. we just have to start doing that

We literally already pulled off a 10-year turnaround by getting a company to dump a lot of orange peels in an area.

Good point! here it is:

people always blast right past the "if we continue with current practices" and go straight to "this is inevitable"

to repeat! people always blast right past the "if we continue with current practices" and go straight to "this is inevitable"

We seldom admit the seductive comfort of hopelessness.

It saves us from ambiguity.

It has an answer for every question:

"There's just no point."

Hope, on the other hand, is messy.

If it might all work out, then we have things to do.

We must weather the possibility of happiness.

— Rebecca Solnit

most damaging idea of the 21st century: the conviction of vast numbers of people that human history will end within our lifetimes

climate change represents world-altering tragedy if unchecked, but not even in the worst-case scenario does it mean “literally everyone dies”

yet so many people have jumped already to “it’s over, the world is going to end, we can do nothing about it” and are just paralyzingly cynical. How do I explain that the power to imagine a future is essential for creating it

you know the thing where trauma can cause you to just. not expect to live much longer so when you get to 30 you don’t know what to do because you thought you’d be dead by 25

That is happening to all of us right now on a society-wide scale

A lot of people are like. REALLY angry at me for suggesting that “be depressed and do nothing” isn’t necessarily the only response to climate change.

this, this, this, this, this, this, and like, 700 other sources will tell you that most of the effects of climate change will be reversible even if we pass the ‘threshold’ of a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in global temperature

BUT. Even if the worst happens, it will be important to be doing things other than wallowing in misery???

I’m not trying to be callous but for people living today it’s wildly unlikely for the results to be “literally immediate death.”

People will get displaced from their homes by rising sea levels. We have like, years, probably decades, before that happens. It seems so fucked up to decide that we should do nothing, because we’ve already decided they’re going to die anyway????

If a bunch of us are going to die, why not die trying to help each other? Why not try to make sure fewer people die? Why not do something that might reduce someone’s suffering or give them food or clean water or a place to sleep?

I don’t know how to explain to you that people need socks during the apocalypse