Loftwings and Demons

I do wish I were better at climate activism.  I feel like this is an urgent problem that needs more attention than it gets and that lifestyle changes, while sometimes positive, are not remotely adequate to address it. 

I also think dialogue on it needs to go beyond 'it exists', which is too often where it ends.  In order to solve a problem, it needs to be discussed in its specifics.  Not all 'solutions' proposed to this issue are actually realistic, possible, just, or compatible with each other.

I also don't think this issue is seperable from other social justice issues, and especially not from other types of environmental activism (eg. pollution and mass extinctions).

But my skills on writing about what I know on these issues are not as developed as I'd like them to be for sure.  It's not that I don't have things I want to say, but actually articulating them fully is difficult for me.  It's very frustrating.

The thing is, any farming done that is separate from the natural ecosystem is not local.  Any farming that considers the natural ecosystem 'just worthless empty space' without it is not local.  Any farming done that uses the pesticides or antibiotics or fertilizer or machines or buildings that use nonlocal inputs for nonlocally obtained seeds or nonlocally obtained animals is not local.  And anything that's going to end up in a waste dump who knows where rather than naturally composting back into the environment is not local.  And any farming that produces massive unnatural amounts of animal dung that ultimately contaminates the water supply and kills local ecosystems while spiking food poisoning rates is not local--it is the destruction of local and the fouling of our own food supply.  And massive cattle monocultures or banana monocultures or cotton monocultures or sugar monocultures or any other monoculture is not local.  Destroying the natural environment to make chocolate or coffee or leather or any other commodity at the expense of the local population (or offloading that expense to some other locality) is not local.  It's a system built on blood in the whole, and the whole of it needs to change.  But as long as people use the language of social justice to prop their favored portions of it up, to reduce environmental activism to the purchase of indulgences like 'local', it won't be going anywhere at all. 

In the wake of countries like China and India deciding (for good reason) not to accept the rest of the world's plastic waste anymore, I have to wonder what's been happening to all the previously recycled plastic waste recently. Is it just being landfilled?  Dumped in the ocean?  Where is it going?  I know a lot of countries scaled back their recycling systems immensely after they started shipping that stuff out of country, so they simply don't have the capacity to recycle most of that.  So it's definitely not being recycled for the most part, I'd guess.  Even before the recent changes a lot of things people thought were being recycled weren't either because they weren't actually suitable to be recycled or because they weren't properly prepared beforehand (I understand that different recycling plants all have different rules on what they'll accept based on how the plant is set up, but the general public is rarely made aware of these rules).