Getting stressed about the plight of future generations is just another displacement activity.
Excluding a few old clueless hippies (who don't know any better, and never will), it's not difficult to understand why environmentalism is largely the preserve of the young. Mortal pragmatism tends to kick in after the first few allegedly "senseless" accidental demises of friends and some close family deaths by natural causes have been experienced firsthand. Murders, it can be argued, add a certain piquancy, and might contribute to someone's short-term anger response spikes, but their positions in any overall pattern, or developing worldview, are skewed by their binary nature: either everyone knows about them, or no one does. "Oh, yeah - I forgot that one of your best mates was stabbed to death," isn't something you're likely to hear outside of a dementia ward.
Awareness of just how potentially small that window of opportunity we call "life" is, whilst cumulative, doesn't necessarily mean you end up not giving a damn about what comes next, or what happens to all the...stuff that's left behind after your departure. Ordinarily this would be an ideal opportunity to set up a stall, and try to sell you a "Reproduction isn't compulsory" t-shirt, but - hopefully - I'm not telling you anything you didn't already know. I say hopefully, because this post is a delayed response to some feedback I received about an earlier one concerning the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (http://community.livejournal.com/anti_gravitas/424885.html). I'll spare you my vigorous defence of plastic (which was apparently at odds with the thrust of my headlining argument, according to one youthful would-be Earthbound Goddess), and instead leave you with Mike Kaulbars' much better stab at hypocrisy-busting:
http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/06/28/the-real-bp-gulf-tragedy-what-if-there-had-been-no-spill/
G'night.
Awareness of just how potentially small that window of opportunity we call "life" is, whilst cumulative, doesn't necessarily mean you end up not giving a damn about what comes next, or what happens to all the...stuff that's left behind after your departure. Ordinarily this would be an ideal opportunity to set up a stall, and try to sell you a "Reproduction isn't compulsory" t-shirt, but - hopefully - I'm not telling you anything you didn't already know. I say hopefully, because this post is a delayed response to some feedback I received about an earlier one concerning the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (http://community.livejournal.com/anti_gravitas/424885.html). I'll spare you my vigorous defence of plastic (which was apparently at odds with the thrust of my headlining argument, according to one youthful would-be Earthbound Goddess), and instead leave you with Mike Kaulbars' much better stab at hypocrisy-busting:
http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/06/28/the-real-bp-gulf-tragedy-what-if-there-had-been-no-spill/
G'night.