madanthony said:
The environmental movement, since it's inception, has been plagued with false prophets of doom.
If you compare their actual predictions (not the lies, or the corporate propaganda videos) with the actual events, the ecologists and similar science types (otherwise known as "environmentalists", when the science interferes with Exxon's business model) look pretty good so far, and the trend is in their favor.
They called Rwanda, Somalia, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the destruction of the Aral Sea, widespread antibiotic resistance, and so forth. They called Fukushima, and Katrina, and the past fifty years of Haitian rolling misery. They called the collapse of major fisheries, problems with loss of genetic diversity in crops, large scale emigration from Mexico and northern Africa and the SE Asian area including the Indonesian islands, serious consequences of weather pattern changes, the only barely prevented and still imminent extinction of many large vertebrates.
And they look especially solid in comparison with the corporate sponsored "think tanks" and their media campaigns, video propaganda outlets, etc. The flying cars, nuclear reactor electricity too cheap to be worth metering, clean plentiful water, cheap easy freeway auto travel, Africa's "Green Revolution" in agriculture, twenty hour work week, and a world without war, are still in beta development or something. But the strip mine wastelands and acid rain killed hemlocks of the Appalachian poverty zones are not imaginary.
One of the problems here is the lack of recognition of the damage done. People easily become accustomed to even seriously degraded environments. We have lost the two dominant tree species and the two most common and significant living vertebrates on the NA continent, we have mercury poisoned most of the fish and fouled almost all the fresh water, - but it's like losing the big tree in the front yard: the grass fills in, and it's like it was never there. The sun beats down, you have to crank the AC in the house, but pretty soon that's just normal life.
Of course we will be eating compressed krill protein and modified food starch instead of fresh chestnuts and whale steaks, but we won't know any better.
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