Do you think that saving the world is a lost cause?

I think getting everyone enthused is a more unrealistic goal than digging ourselves out of this major ecological hole we’re in.

I think people are interested in helping in any way that they are convinced would help. Yes, if you can convince everyone to get on the same page everyone would follow suit. The problem is convincing everyone to get on the same page.

The scientific world is on board and they’re doing what they can. But they need the rest of the world to follow suit. The big challenge, I think, is in dumbing down the scientific mumbo jumbo to a point where the necessary memes can spread virally and effectively to the unscientific masses. I think there’s still too much high-level information that the unscientific masses find too perplexing to wrap their head around. Without that communication, the masses will remain unconvinced and slow to act.

The world will do just fine. She will see us come and go.
Its our civilization that may be endangered.
The best thing the average lazy PC potato can do is…STOP VOTING FOR THE IDIOTS , them that mindfu*k you with their propaganda.

(And man-up and admit when you are wrong, ie. many of those that voted for Bush knew in their hearts his policies were wrong but were afraid to admit any weakness or defeat so continued to support.The Sin of Pride.)

Of course not.

No. It’s not a lost cause. It’s your home.
I still do the dishes and laundry every day even though I know I will have a another pile tomorrow.

People will get on board when it affects them in a tangible way.
There are still Flat Earthers out there who will never be convinced the world is round until they need to fly someplace or look beyond their range.

(Funny, I just noticed the link is from Alaska. net. Coinkydink?)

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

That’s it in a nutshell.

The planet is not in jeopardy. Mother Earth will be here long after the last remnant Homo sapiens has vanished. The only difference between us and every other critter that has come and gone is our hubris in imagining that we can effect the cosmic gyrations of the planet, and that we will be here forever.

I have to agree with @Odysseus when the best the UN and all the other elected officials can come up with for dealing with global green house issues is Carbon Credits?? Just another half ass Ponzi scheme where traders will get rich and will have a net zero impact on what really is messing up our world.

The problem here is that everyone has a unique definition of what “saving the world” constitutes.

I think people have been saving the world, just as they have been predicting the apocalypse, since the beginning of time. I doubt they will cease either activity any time soon.

I think it should be as simple as getting enthused, but I’m not sure it is.
An interesting clip, about how our identification with the system holds us back. Not because we don’t want to ‘save the world,’ but because we’ve grown up ‘depending on the system’ that’s destroying it.

As for it being a lost cause? Even if we never do change (which I sincerely hope isn’t the case,) we’re running out of oil, which is what is what runs this current destructive path we’ve carved and are carving. I don’t know how much more damage we’ll be able to do in that time, and I hope it’s minimal, I hope that at least the other species of life are able to survive, but we can’t do this forever. Nature will—eventually—win the battle we’ve started against it.

Not at all.

Did you ever ask the world if it wanted saving?

Let’s be honest here. We’re talking about human needs. Some humans want energy and are willing to trade a significant amount of environmental destruction in order to get it. Other humans want to preserve wild space or whatever, and are willing to forgo energy from this or that particular spot in order to do that.

There is no objective point of view on this. Only different preferences and priorities. This makes it difficult to say what “saving” actually is.

I think the real problem is that environmentalists thing they aren’t getting enough seats at the table, and the reason is that the energy companies are buying off our representatives who are sitting at that table.

So we’re back to politics. I don’t think that we are anywhere near being close to throwing in the towel. We have a long and constant battle to represent the side of conservation of the environment in a more pristine state. It’s a battle that will go on and on, far after the time when we’ve all been uploaded to computers and no one things we need natural life any more.

Sure, the earth will still be around no matter what. Now let’s quibble about whether we’ll do enough to save just a few bacteria, or actual ecosystems.~

Industrial civilization is causing a major extinction event, one that is progressing much faster than natural extinction events because this one is causing cascading feedback loops. It may very well be too late to stop widespread climate change, but that’s not an excuse to keep devouring the planet. Indeed, that’s all the more reason to stop, so we at least have a fighting chance of adapting our ways of life and the ecosystems we depend on.

I’m reminded of the story of the starfish. It went something like this:

A little girl at the beach was picking up starfish that were washed in by the tide, and was throwing them back into the ocean. Some old codger comes along and says “It doesn’t matter, you can’t get them all back into the ocean. There’s too many.” The little girl responds “It matters for that one, and that one, and that one…”

I really like George Carlin’s take on mainstream environmentalism:

“People are selfish, and that’s what they’re doing, they’re trying to save the planet for themselves to have a nicer place to live. They don’t care about the planet. They just care about having a comfortable place…

“People want their goodies. They want their toys. Everybody wants the newest gizmo. We’re slaves to gizmos and toys. Everybody wants a cell phone that will make pancakes and they think that’ll make them happy.”

Also, I’m pretty astounded every time someone brings up the Flat Earth society seriously. It’s a satire, people.

No, it is definitely not a lost cause. Human beings have been saving the world since 1700 when technological changes have begun overwhelming people and change happened at an accelerated pace.

I’ve shared this with you before:

Prosperity keeps spreading. Worldwide on average we are better off than 20 years ago, much better off than 50 years ago and significantly better off than 200 years ago. Life expectancy, wealth, literacy rates, access to medicine, food supply, safety, social freedoms, and the general state of the environment are improving. Imagine the choice of food a king in the year 1650 had compared to us today. Our grocery stores are no match for even what the richest people at the time could get. And they had to use really smelly toilets. Compared to them we are all kings today. King of kings. Switch of a button. And there was light. Turn a faucet. And there was clean water. Hit another button. And there was music performed by an orchestra. News from Europe or America. Ah, two mouse clicks.

The media focus on bad news for two reasons:

1) prosperity is so commonplace and therefore not worth mentioning
2) prosperity of the media themselves heavily depends on selling bad news

We need to continue using our creativity to deal with the challenges ahead. We can’t afford to just have fun. New ideas and innovation are key, especially to deal with the energy and resource problem. But collective intelligence will find solutions.

People had to work longer for the same food 20 years ago, 50 years ago or 200 years ago. The average of all 6.7 people are much better off today than 20 years ago, 50 years ago or 200 years ago. You need to check hard data and not draw conclusions from highly selective bad news stories conveyed by our media. The same applies to safety. More people were affected by armed conflicts and genocides in the past. More people were affected by catastrophic natural disasters in the past. Had the 2004 tsunami happened 50 years ago at least 2 million people would have been killed instead of the 230,000. Imagine the progress the world community’s rescue forces have made.

Here’s an interesting example from Matt Ridley: “If you sat and read a book by the light of an 18-watt compact fluorescent light bulb and you read by that light for an hour, you would consume 18 watt hours of electricity. If you’re on the minimum average wage (£479 a week) and pay the average tariff for your electricity (9p per kWh), that hour will have cost you about a quarter of a second of labour – a little more if you include the cost of the bulb. To get the same amount of light with a conventional filament lamp in 1950 and the then average wage, you’d have needed to work for eight seconds. Using a kerosene lamp in the 1880s, you’d have needed to work for 15 minutes; a tallow candle in the 1800s, more than six hours. From a quarter of a day to a quarter of a second is an 86,400-fold improvement.”

More people in developed countries were working 60 hour weeks at mind-numbing jobs 50 or 100 years ago than today. Again, I’m not saying further improvements are not necessary. We need to become more energy efficient and we need better ways to replace crude oil. For example by cultivating saltwater micro algae. Increasing fresh water scarcity is a huge issue too, but many of the technologies are already available such as gray water use or use of desalinated non-drinking water. But challenges do not contradict the overall positive prosperity trend.

Here’s another example: “In 1958 only 36% of all Americans had air conditioning. Today 79% of Americans below the poverty line have air conditioning.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-ridley/down-with-doom-how-the-wo_b_630792.html

In my opinion it’s great to have Greenpeace and WWF and Realclimate.com

Shrill warnings are absolutely necessarily. We cannot afford to overlook anything that significantly matters to our future.

But we have to make sure people do not get the impression that all in all the worldwide trend is negative and we are doomed anyway. That a food crisis of massive proportions is almost inevitable or that our pollinators will most likely go extinct.

Our communication should be solution oriented.

We should not limit ourselves to problem-oriented thinking and problem-oriented communication.

Here are two here’s a great books that talks about solutions:

http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Flat-Crowded-Revolution---America/dp/B002BWQ504/

http://www.naturaledgeproject.net/factor5.aspx

We have to use fewer resources to achieve a particular benefit. Here are two energy examples: In 1989 we owned a car in Kansas moving us 12 miles using 1 gallon of fuel. Today in 2011 my Ford Fiesta allows us to move 65 miles using 1 gallon of fuel. More than 20 years ago double-glazed windows were already standard in Germany while most of the UK still relied on single panes. Today we are moving toward triple-glazed windows and the insulation of walls and roofs are far superior. It costs less and less to heat a house in the winter.

What about other resources? Well, the ultimate goal must be cradle-to-crade manufacturing, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_to_Cradle_Design

Our global intelligence will get us there. At some point garbage dumps will become practically obsolete. This will create a sustainable system. Of course we also need to change our way of life, but it will still be a better life than in the past. Cars require only a quarter of gas than they did in the past, but people cross eight times longer distances, so in absolute terms more fossil fuels are being consumed. Something needs to be done about this, no doubt. It is a problem. So what is the solution? There are plenty. Car pooling, HOV lanes, working from home 1–2 days a week instead of driving to the office every day, using trains running on electricity based on renewable energy sources, modern public transport in our urban regions (the US should learn from Europe here), car sharing i.e. not owning a car (saves resources to produce cars) at all.

Zero-energy buildings are a reality already. Of course it will take many decades for them to become widespread.

Most heated discussions about the difference between the two following views:

1) Humanity as a whole got serious problems and change for the better is too slow
2) Humanity as a whole got serious problems and this is what we need to do

Our mindset must shift towards number 2.

According to M. Ridley ideas are “having sex with other ideas” from all over the planet with ever-increasing promiscuity. We can’t extrapolate in a linear way from the present state of society. R. Kurzweil calls this the law of accelerating returns. We’ve seen paradigm shifts every decade or so for the past 300 years. It’s reasonable to predict more of these shifts in the near future. Therefore the potential of humanity avoiding failure is immense. Saving the world is NOT a lost cause. On the contrary.