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myrmepropagandist

The bald eagle could have easily gone extinct. But we did all sorts of "woke" things protecting it legally, ran conservation and study programs, banned DDT (that was good for other reasons too) and in 2007 they were removed from the endangered species list.

Likewise pine forests could be dead from acid rain.

The ozone could have a huge hole.

We CAN take care of nature when we want to. And the successes have been worth it.

I feel like we forget this, you know?

@futurebird yeah totally. We can do it. Do we have the will?

@va2lam @futurebird apparently we have, given that all those things happened even against the profit motives of very powerful people and corporations.
I guess it's more a matter of leaving things to last minute.

@futurebird @levampyre this war before the culture wars. if society would have been in the eighties, Sunscreen would be banned and children would have to drink leaded fuel before school.

@futurebird if I were a conspiracy theorist, it's almost as if there's some cabal of people who saw all the work you mentioned and went NEVER AGAIN, and proceeded to embark on campaigns that we were never and aren't under any environmental threat and that all this work was for The Man to enact control of the populace

@futurebird it really breaks the defeatist "we can't do anything, so we shouldn't" default to point stuff like this out. a lot of the large scale problems we face have immediately available solutions and they don't get implemented because of capitalism or status quo politics, or both

@futurebird Glad to see Eagles off the endangered list. I’m still concerned about the fish eating birds affected by heavy metals in the Great Lakes. Wisconsin’s DNR has strict guidelines for human consumption of fish.
widnr.widen.net/s/s6mkcq6tmr/p

widnr.widen.netPUB_FH_824_ChooseWisely.pdf

@futurebird I'm old enough to remember when those damn woke folks had a problem with cigarette machines in places frequented by kids and teenagers.

@futurebird I never thought of any of these policies as woke.

@mister914 What could be more woke than saving a bird?

@futurebird The endangered species act was passed 92-0 in the senate, 390-12 in the house and signed by Nixon. The ban of DDT was by the EPA under Nixon and EPA administrator Ruckelshaus, a Republican. The Montreal Protocol banned CFCs in 1989. It was widely supported as it has been ratified by every country in the UN.

It is inspiring to see that people do come together when motivated.

@futurebird environmentalism and conservation aren't "woke"

@futurebird they have their whole own history with separate social and legislative successes and failures.

Environmentalism has a long history of globalism: everyone is at risk from a dying planet.

Woke additions to that, like <seas rise, minorities hardest hit> are a new thing, and certainly post-dated banning DDT and saving the bald eagle

@futurebird HMM…BECAUSE WE THE PEOPLE SAT SILENT IN 2016 AND DID NOT ASK FOR THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION TO BE INVALIDATED. WE JUST SUCKED IT UP AND DID NOT QUESTION RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE, NOR DID WE CHALLENGE THE VOTES. OUR SILENCE AND THE MEDIAS COMPLICITY IN REPORTING POSITIVE THINGS ABOUT THE RAPIST AND NEGATIVE THINGS ABOUT THE SECRETARY OF STATE BROUGHT US TO THIS POINT.

@futurebird
Good to read something positive around climate change. Gives all of us hope.

@futurebird I agree, and intuitively I know that it's 'worth it'. Do you have concrete arguments for someone who challenges 'why' it's worth the effort?

How do you explain the fight for biodiversity and long-term survival to someone who doesn't want to engage either out of lazyness or because they struggle enough for their short term survival already...

@futurebird

Excellent observations. 👍

My favorite friend and I thank you.

On the Vermillion River in Minnesota he always visits my special place and watches me fish, moving a little further out on his perch when I catch a big one.

@futurebird My *congressman sued the US for a timber corridor preserved by the Obama administration. He aalao thinks wolves should be delisted and that the ESA ia burdensome the EPA redundant and an enemy of the Chambers of Commrce

@futurebird

Now ask people if they think it's really worth it to use AI, (killing professionals) buy cheap stuff online (suporting polution & forced labour) or keep using FB, Insta, Google, Netflix etc which financially supports investors who keep making this world a mess.

@futurebird

I suspect it would not be a stretch to speculate that some not inconsiderable effort goes into memory-holing these facts....

@futurebird
One tricky thing about CO2 (and other greenhouse gasses) is that they are much more diffuse and come from more sources. There were only so many chemical making DDT or CFCs. Scrubbers effectively put a stop to acid rain. GHGs are different in that addressing them basically means "stop burning things", which is a way bigger ask than "stop making a few particular chemicals" or "put these things on your smoke stacks".

This is not to say that we shouldn't do things to slow climate change. Only that CO2 is harder to solve than SOx and NOx.

@unikitty @futurebird Harder to solve due to politics, anyway.

@futurebird We are still snipping around the edges. Fundamental changes are needed but the time for that is running out - fast.

@futurebird

Almost all of the current problems are fixable with our current level of technology.

And this includes the ones with solutions that are just out of our current reach, with some focused research.

We need to choose knowledge. :D

@futurebird The system is setup so we can win temporarily, win temporarily, win temporarily and then lose forever. As long as our civilization is on this path, more and more of those forever losses will pile up until there are no more profits to be made and no more shareholder value to be extracted.

@futurebird consider: the bald eagle is a symbol of the US, its mascot, imaged on money, official seals and all sorts of government stuff. to let it go extinct would have been a national embarrassment -- therefore the phenomenal effort to find the cause of its demise (DDT) and eradicate it, despite any concerns about lost profits to whatever corporation was manufacturing it.

would a similar effort be made today?

@rothko I don’t think it would— you would not see both parties united to get it done— it’d be labeled a liberal issue and dismissed I think.

@futurebird
I got a tattoo of a turkey to remind me that we can protect and help the species recover that we've almost made extinct.
#WeCanDoThis

@futurebird
The ozone layer still has a huge gaping hole located over the south pacific.
In part, some reports suggest, owing to the continued use of perchloroethylene.
Vanity will kill us all eventually.

@futurebird There seemed a brief time between the 1950s and 1980s we could get people to do things like put aside self interest in favor of public health and the environment. Now it's all a Chinese plot to take away your guns.

@skepticsbookoflists @futurebird things like put aside short-term self interest in favor of long-term self-interest

@futurebird It's amazing the number of people on Twitter who claimed acid rain wasn't a problem. I can't rule out the possibility that they were just trolling, though.

@futurebird Boston harbor, reforestation of new England, return of wild turkeys, coyotes, some wolves. Honey bees not as bad off as we thought. How are the bats doing lately?

@msokolov

@futurebird Honey Bees are an invasive species in North America.

@futurebird That's the most disheartening part. We CAN do better, as a species.

It's a CHOICE that those in power have made, to not do better...

@futurebird What is particularly galling is the demographic most likely be in the dark on this are also the most likely to live out in the country, and fish, and hunt and profess to be “stewards” of nature 🙄

@futurebird One thing that's really infuriating is that there are some anti-environmentalists who treat every example of environmental measures working as "proof" that the environment is doing fine and doesn't need our help.

@futurebird damals gabs kein kntetnet zum verbreiten von du willst das nicht theorien

@futurebird Another: In the 70s I volunteered with the Caretta Research Project (still going! carettaresearchproject.org/res), tagging sea turtles as they came up the beach to nest. They were in serious trouble, largely because they kept getting drowned in shrimp nets. We passed a law to require turtle excluder devices, and the population rebounded.

@futurebird (Should have specified loggerhead sea turtles, Caretta caretta. Georgia occasionally gets other species nesting, but not often.)

@futurebird Whenever people say we can't tackle climate change because it needs to be done by all countries and you can't get everyone to sign up to take actions cooperatively, I wonder if they forgot about that whole ozone hole thing and the Montreal Protocol. I mean, we did that in the 80s! With people like Reagan and Thatcher in charge of countries! Hell, they even pushed for action and following the science.

It can be done - if our politicians weren't so bought off or blinded by ideology.

@futurebird the scale of the change required is massively different though, and the sector who has the most to lose is powerful enough to successfully fight back, as we have been seeing

@ehproque @futurebird US clean air and water acts were pretty huge. At least part of the difference was that they dealt with avoidable side-effects, industries could adapt without fundamental changes to their business models.

@futurebird I tell young people about these course corrections frequently. They need examples where policies and regulations were effective. I tell em how in my childhood the air often stunk of petrochemicals. We need to cultivate hope.

@knowuh @futurebird Have to repeat, because it is the core of my drive to live and be an activist: We need to cultivate hope!

@futurebird perversely, our success with dealing with CFCs and the ozone layer problems is why the fossil fuel industry is so well positioned to stop any changes. they saw what happened with CFCs and spent billions to gain the political influence to make sure that kind of thing would never happen again without their control

@futurebird the irony here being that climate change denialists cynically use the ozone layer repair as proof that they somehow don't need to change because it magically fixed itself.

@DaveMWilburn

Well then we need to brag more about our successes.

@futurebird

Yeah, maybe...

Heck, probably.

Although I'm reminded about this unattributed quote about libertarians:

"Libertarians are like house cats. Completely dependent on a system they neither understand nor appreciate and fiercely confident of their own independence."

These same nitwits think that Y2K solved itself, too.

@DaveMWilburn @futurebird

also

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]
John Rogers

@futurebird @DaveMWilburn ozone hole is still there though and not a solved question

@DaveMWilburn
A denial bomb I ve been thrown to my face was when my father told that "someone else told him" that because of the ozone layer getting rebuild, we could face stronger climate change, as it s making the atmosphere thicker... So, let's go kill this ozone layer!!

I really wasn't prepared from all this.
@futurebird

@DaveMWilburn >the ozone layer repair as proof that they somehow don't need to change because it magically fixed itself.
It didn't - ozone depleting refrigerants were banned, which gave it a chance to recover.

It's still many decades away from recovery and still very thin in areas, but things may turn around again due to how certain CFC's are being produced again in China.

@Suiseiseki I know. You're preaching to the choir here.

@futurebird

If Rachel Carson was around she'd be on the Fediverse - not Twitter - and she'd follow you.