How many pieces of fast fashion is equal to one of those 10-minute private jet flights? How about when 400-ft yachts get “repositioned” across thousands of miles. Why should millionaires and billionaires be the only ones with wasteful lifestyles? Because there aren’t that many of them, relatively speaking?If the earth is doomed anyway, then maybe everyone should get to enjoy the last hurrah, instead of billions of people scrimping so that a handful of oligarchs can fuck the planet over to their heart’s content for a few more years. Sorry, not feeling too optimistic about the future of humanity this morning.
The argument that fast fashion is wasteful doesn’t include “and billionaires should do whatever they want”.
The attitude of “if that group can cause harm then I can too” is how we got to the current situation and why we can’t get out of it. It doesn’t allow us the leeway to solve even the first problem on the list.
Of course it’s wasteful. The entire modern lifestyle is ecologically unsustainable at our current technological level. But who is going to be the first to cut back on their own standard of living? Nobody (in meaningful numbers) is willing to do that. People give so little shit about the planet that they’re willing to use as much electricity as medium-size countries to run a magical numbers lottery. People will move to the desert and insist on green lawns and setting their ACs at 65. People will build entire ghost cities or man-made islands instead of investing in more sustainable developments. Let’s face it, our monkey brains have evolved to optimize for our own comfort in the short term and discount any long term costs. I just hope the same monkey brains will be smart enough to find a way to survive all the disasters of our own making.
> Let’s face it, our monkey brains have evolved to optimize for our own comfort in the short term and discount any long term costs.
Well we have entered the capitalocene era. The monkey in us is not at fault, private property and hierarchy are the main culprits who organized the colonization, subjugation and destruction of much of the planet, including all cultures who differed in their will to fuck up everything.
It's not too late to burn all banks and police stations and suddenly with these barriers removed you'll see humanity has a lot of creativity and lucidity after all. It's just an unfortunate situation that the lucid people who try to stop this madness get beaten/imprisoned by the cops or assassinated by multinationals.
That's not the attitude people tend to have, though. It's more along the lines of "if you're emitting way more CO2 than I am, reduce your own emissions until you're not before you tell me that I need to reduce mine". (Basically the same point being made in Matthew 7:3-5 except with respect to environmentalism instead of morality.)
