Is there something to be said for the old days regarding a “greener” earth?

Sure. But individual impact is nothing compared to the industrial impact that was just starting to fire up in that same time frame, including the exhaust put out to manufacture and run streetcars and crank out newspapers.

Do you think that is was greener when no humans were on it?
Wouldn’t that BE the good old days ?

Sure. And then the older generation started packaging everything in plastic, tossed all that plastic into landfills (or just anywhere they pleased), built a country designed for each individual to drive everywhere, rather than making public transit a viable option, and decided that the best way to live was out in a suburban housing development an hour away from your job.

^^I guess it depends how old we are talking about.

I know! Millennials shouldn’t complain. They were the ones that somehow time-traveled and secured an economic system that thrives on short-term profit and perpetual growth. Kids being born today should have had the insight to have been born at an earlier time so they could have used glass milk bottles.

Millennials are blamed for everything.

@hmmmmmm Millennials aren’t blamed for everything, give me a break.

Hmmmmmmm you certainly have a burr under your saddle!

Because of past mistakes, we have developed many changes to become greener.
My gosh, I can remember LA when no skyline was visible. The air was reddish brown, and you could TASTE it!

The human race is a bunch of infants on this planet compared to most other living creatures. We make mistakes, but at least we are capable of learning from them.

@JLeslie: ”@hmmmmmm Millennials aren’t blamed for everything, that’s ridiculous.”

Granted, “everything” was a slight exaggeration. But here are a few things that millennials have ruined, apparently.

Everything humans do to save the environment and stop man made climate change, no matter how noble, radical or good it is can’t stop what is going on on the Sun. Researchers predict that the next ice will likely begin within the next 1,500 years. Glaciers covering half of North America, Europe and Asia will likely become an issue to deal with.

Nevertheless, we have to continue to protect our environment the best we can for future generations and wish them well with thier ice age. Some think living on Mars is a good idea to escape disasters on Earth but if the Earth is hit with an ice age so will Mars. The average temperature on Mars is around -80 degrees F now. You can run but you can’t hide from the Sun. Unless cold fission and space vehicles that can travel light speed can be developed. I’d really love to be around to see that for sure.

@hmmmmmm Some of those things aren’t quite gone yet, and some of those things it isn’t bad they are going or gone.

Because of technology young people have more power than previously I think. That can be good and bad.

^ My point is that it’s been years of nonstop articles about how millenials are killing or stopping or ruining things. To now see that they are blamed for killing the environment they have inherited is absurd.

We all understand that there are “more green” individual practices in certain areas in the past. But these didn’t disappear due to young people being born and deciding that they prefer [insert less-green practice here]. They are the recipients of these less-green practices. And more importantly, they are the ones that have inherited a future that is far more bleak than the imaginary self-righteous “much-older lady” from the Facebook story. To get cute about how “green” it was back in the day might make some people feel better – but it’s really a blame-the-victim situation.

@hmmmmmm I don’t really see anyone here bringing up millenials except you. I do think there was less waste in previous times, especially after the depression. Of course, it is corporations that have caused the expansion of waste, no doubt about it. And we are all responsible for holding them to account as well as doing our own part to aid the environment.

@janbb: ”@hmmmmmm I don’t really see anyone here bringing up millenials except you”

Fair enough. I interpreted this….

@JLeslie: “the young cashier suggested to the much older lady”

@JLeslie: “But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the “green thing” back then?”

…to mean “millenials”. But you’re right. It could be “gen z” or whatever they’re called.

@hmmmmmm Yes, it could be a 15 year old and likely was.

I think the millenials will be the ones to start reversing the dangers our previous generation caused, unknowingly.

They also performed open air nuclear testing, dumped mercury and cadmium in rivers, and poured DDT on beaches and soil.
Some things were better but some were worse – much worse.

@hmmmmmm I think all generation are tired of blaming other generations or being blamed. It’s way more complex in reality what has happened to the environment, and societies across the planet. The original post was an older person responding to an accusation by a younger person, so it was the younger person who put out the first antagonist remark. The whole thing is likely fake, but I just threw it out there for discussion.

^ I think it is a good discussion to have – that is, in what ways can we reduce our footprint, etc. But the fictional young person does reflect a valid concern that young people have today. They can’t fathom why their parents’ and grandparents’ generations allowed this to happen.

@JLeslie: “The young clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.””

I hear this from teens – including my daughter. And they are right. They are reaching early adulthood at a time when climate science is telling us we have < 12 years to take drastic action to limit climate catastrophe. And they see this disaster as a hot potato that has been placed on their lap from earlier generations. It doesn’t seem fair, and there is resentment.

Sure, the fictional young person made the first “antagonistic remark”. But that doesn’t mean that the defensiveness and self-righteous response from the older person has any merit. Besides the fact that there were some things that could be described as “more green” concerning consumption habits, etc, we know two things for sure: 1) there were other things that were worse (less environmental regulations,etc), and 2) these same people allowed and participated in the loss of these minor good things in a way that cannot be said about young people who would not be born until decades later.

Let’s discuss how we can reduce our impact on the environment as individuals. That’s fine. But we don’t need to blame those who were not alive to create this mess.

I think that it is important to note that most of the climate change deniers are in the older generations. Kids today grow up learning about it in school, and learning different ways to combat it. They aren’t quite of age yet, but when they are I think we’ll start seeing some real progress.

I think in order to go back to a time where there was little environmental damage being done, we’d have to go back to the 1500’s to the 1700’s, the time of the native Americans and the colonists, horses, grain mills, woolen mills, carpentry, blacksmithing, prior to the Industrial Age, prior to the invention of plastic. Yes, whales were hunted almost to extinction and so were the buffalo, but we didn’t have plastic, we didn’t have automobiles or planes or computers. It was pretty much hunt it, grow it, eat it, deal with it.

And children died pretty regularly. Women died in child birth. If you developed an infection and couldn’t fight it off, you’d die.
Like someone said above, in some ways things were better, but in many ways things were much, much worse.

No doubt, @Dutchess_III and I am thankful all the time that I am alive now when we have medical advances and technology that we do, and that I live in a place where we have the best medical care. I was not saying that it would be better to be alive during the 1500’s to the 1700’s, I was referring to the question as it was asked about the former decades being greener.

Me too. Especially when it comes to having babies. It would be so freaking terrifying to have something go wrong and you’re in all that pain and totally helpless. How the women did it 9, 10+ times is beyond me.
I’d have been dead 4 times over if it wasn’t for modern medicine.

@JLeslie “I guess it depends how old we are talking about.”

Not many folks still around from before that time.

Rick’s dad. He was born in 1922 and he’s still with his.

“Not many”, not “none”.

“Is there something to be said for the old days regarding a “greener” earth?”
– How do people not get the importance of the health of their own planet?

Is there something? How can there be any question of whether it is absolutely vital to have a healthy planet, and not risk ruining it?

Oh don’t forget driving cars and trucks that put out emissions equivalent to hundreds of today’s vehicles. Remember the toxic smog that covered LA in the 1970s and early 80s?

For each insult to the environment we learned, studied, got smarter, spent resources, addressed the issue and moved on. radiation, ozone hole, heavy metals, pesticides, smog, etc.

Now we’ve learned the CO2 we’ve been dumping into the environment is doing damage. Unfortunately things are different this time. People are dumber and are easily swayed by influencers that have financial interests in keeping the status quo.
There are actually people who believe “Clean Coal” is real. Incredible….
And the world is flat.

I think the OP was talking more like at the turn of the last century, before the industrial age.

There are many things we can do different, but a major climate change is inevitable.
Scientists say that with the ice caps melting, the rate we heat up will advance even more quickly. Apparently, the polar ice reflects a great deal of the sun’s light and heat. With the ice diminishing, our planet will be absorbing much more heat. That means major evaporation. That could result in cloud cover so deep, almost instant ice age.
I think it could also result in vastly receding bodies of water, followed by Amazon like rains global. That would change the shape of land masses, erode land everywhere, and environments everywhere would be wetter for a while.
Things could get wicked wild for several years before things settle into a pattern again.

One thing is for sure, a lot of plant and animal species are going to be extinct soon.

We here in the west are improving our behavior a lot, but China industrialized much more recently. They are using practices much like we were half a century ago. They are currently suffering air pollution similar to what our major cities had when I was young. They are polluting water sources, and using damaging mining practices.

I really believe we are already past the point of having a choice. Major climate change is eminent. The best we can hope for is to slow it down some.

If we could shut it down, completely, this instant, I think the earth could recover in a decade. Of course, there would be very few of us left after a decade of no technology.