Of course she is right, the way we are living is nonsense, we have made a mess of things here on Earth...we are so seperated from nature and anything natural that we are not in connection with reality. We are totally deluded. This deep ignorance has been with us always, so that the scripture may be fufilled, but if we want to be victorious in reaching the end of the Way through the Way, we must evolve. Evolution is how we have gotten to this advanced level of living (progress) which is a reflection of the greatness of the soul and of God. But to correct the errors of the whole of history we must leave behind the ignorance and the weakness. Maya must be transcended so that we may reach as a species, and for the well being of all sentient beings across the cosmos, and in honor of god, a higher level of success as beings. All this is totally possible for us given the existene of the values Compassion and Love, values deeply ingrained into the fabric of the cosmos, values which make it possible for all sentient beings to succeed and achieve complete victory and unity and discover the true meanining of Liberty.

Greta's approach will always be bad because she is just a child, she had no idea what this life is or how to correctly interact with people, much less a large crowd. Its basically child abuse to put her through this, put her in nonsense debates and lectures and film her and put it out for the world to see...she is just 16, right? God bless her. This girl is Einstein compared to what I was at 16....If I was her parent I would be taking better care of her...but this is her destiny...and whatever has put her here and has made her pass through these trials and errors shall take her home...so its all for the best. But let us reflect on that Rumi quote;

I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.

Yes, and I think it's because we are truly hardcoded wired that way. Tunnel vision and tunnel thinking is a great asset but also a great burden to have. Humans crawled up to mountains in caves for years of isolation to just get 'a grip on yourself', to save just one soul from the natural habits.

The angry and shame-on-you strategy doesn't jive with me.
What does? Accepting that nature doesn't care about suffering and ingrained us with codex of individualism, egoism, self preservation, etc. We did not invent ourselves.
I feel I am doing better for myself and the world when starting from a point of acceptance rather than shame, guild or forms of self loathing. Everyone's mileage may vary.

For a long time though, i was naive enough to believe that we humans would eventually agree on the issue.

I now realise that this is never gonna happen.

There are still people who even deny global warming is a fact, and then there are a lot of people who deny that there is a relationship between global warming and CO2.

Naieve and stupid of me to think that those people could be convinced with facts and arguments.

Are people realy so stupid that they don't understand that global warming is about global average's?

I'm not sure. But i'm beginning to believe that some of them only pretend to be that dumb, just so that they can keep saying it's all a hoax.

And then the relation between CO2 and temperature....
That's just basic science.

Not 97% of the scientists agree about this. 100% does. What they don't agree about is how exactly that translates into climatological effects, because the earth's climate just happens to be a very complex system.

But the fact that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation and converts the energy of it to heat is just a basic property of the molecule.
That is literally undisputed among scientists. CO2 lasers rely on this principle, it is easily testable in a lab, amateur scientists could test it themselves at home even, if they would be dedicated enough.

It realy is an unwillingness to face the facts.
Wich means that arguments and education don't matter.

Greta's anger is totally justified. I often feel the same anger.
But then i have to remind myself of the uselessness of it.

The situation is hopeless. There are simply not enough people willing to admit that CO2 emissions are changing the climate. So the will to reduce these emissions is lacking.

Disasters and huge crises are unavoidable at this point. It does not have to be the end of the world. But for millions of people it sure will be.

A side step from the actual debate:
Counting nodding heads has never been a scientifical method to accept or deny a theory, on the contrary! It is a fallacy regurgitated at nauseam.

Sorry for that

Point taken.

What i meant ofcourse, is that it is a very basic fact that is not realy open to interpretation.

If people, serious people that is, say that climate change as a result of CO2 is not 100% sure, they usually mean that it is not sure how exactly CO2 emmisions will affect the earths climate. Not that there is no effect at all.

Denying that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, requires almost the same level of anti-science paranoia as flat-earth.

I think you need to make the distinction between global warming and anthropogenic climate change. That's the point a lot of people, myself included, are referring to when we discuss this issue and not that CO2 doesn't contribute to the greenhouse effect.



Exactly, so why care?

There's a dozen other pressing environmental issues that actually need solving and are demonstrable/observable with our eyes, not reliant on theoretical modelling, and could potentially be dealt with e.g. plastic in the oceans.

The key difference is that all of the other environmental issues do not require the inevitable solution that the global warming one is slowly building towards --> totalitarianism. It's incredible that people can't see that is what this is building up to.

People need to pay more attention. The mainstream media isn't there to report news, it's there to set the narrative for particular political agendas and to not report or obfuscate stories that are damaging to particular interests.

Some people also deny that CO2 plays a role in global warming.
The "CO2 is actually good" narrative.

But anyway, in order to deny any anthropogenic effects, you would first have to deny that the composition of the atmosphere is being altered by burning fossil fuels, or that the contribution of fossil fuels to changes in the atmosphere is negligible.

The moment you admit that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that the percentage of CO2 in the earths atmosphere is changing significantly because of our oil, coal and to a lesser extent, gas consumption, then you automatically have to admit that there is an anthropogenic effect.

I am curious if there is any way you could ever be convinced. I think not.
I unfortunately suspect that you are determined to never, ever accept that human activity has climatological effects, no matter what evidence you would be presented with.

It is definately true that there are some environmentalists out there, who out of some protestantism-derived ethics, would want to see all human technology banned, as it represents wicked, sinfull hedonism to them.
Those people are having a field day, ofcourse. Just as some people on the far-right are having a fieldday, everytime a muslimfundamentalist goes on a killingspree in the name of allah.

But those people cannot be sufficient reason not to care.

If the climate changes, a lot of agricultural activity will have to be relocated.
Because a lot of our agricultural products happen to depend on very specific climatological conditions.

Ofcourse some people will benefit as well. In some places, land will become arable. But millions of people will lose their prime source of income. Many traditional local products will become extinct.

These are things that are extremely likely to happen, because of how dependant a lot of agriculture is on very exact climatological conditions.

Think how in the wine industry, people talk about a good or a bad year. That is all within a certain, fixed climatological range. Now imagine that range changing. Even slightly.

Cutting meat out of your diet, Eating locally sourced organic food, not using plastics, using renewable clean energy, eliminating pollution, praying that our fellow beings jump off the karma wheel. buddha help me. I'm just trying to teach my kids how to sustain themselves so maybe they'll teach their kids as well. Basic survival skills and life long lessons about farming, building and renewable energy. Treating the planet like it's your home. Things that everyone should know.

The issue with the idea that simply eating organic and local food is environmentally friendly is that often local, organic agricultural systems are still often environmentally detrimental. "Organic" is a lable becomming more and more blurred. It is a certification people pay for to begin with. A poorer farmer down the road who cant afford the certification may very well have far better cleaner fruit than the organic guy up the road most people buy from, while excercising better land management practices. I can assure this is the case more often than people realize.

I live in an agricultural valley on a fruit orchard. I run my own fully organic garden business and work pruning contracts for organic fruit farmers through the winter. Having grown up in a large city, and now living in a rural community it has certainly muddied a lot of ideologies I held about...well the world of farmers, who live and breath every day at the source.

Firstly, you must realize that these people often are working they're freaking asses off so we have a constant supply chain of food going into the cities etc. I watch my neighbours out there 7 days a week. They out there before the sun is up, they are working often past dark. Owning a farm is not a normal job. It is not something most people would enjoy. It's constant work, stress, you are at the whim of nature and it's hard to really make it.

Now, more and more traditional fruit orchards in the Okanagan valley are being cut down. Food is not being replanted. Why? Wineries. It's more lucrative. Now, more well off mostly liberal(ish) city folk are moving here to buy up orchards, cut them down to be replaced with pretentious wineries offering silly tours, to city tourists. The poorer farmers trying to grow organic produce have to find some way to compete...so they are forced to bring in cheap labor, imported. Locals dont get jobs because they cannot compete with wages that wont even pay rent, and there is a growing population of homelessness and drug addiction, even in this little town. Some farmers will go far enough to offer $$ packages to tourists so they can actually stay on the farm and gawk at the underpaid staff as they work tirelessly...to give the rich folk who can afford that kind of thing the "real experience" of farming. There is a huge dissconnect often I think, where people have idealized the rural farm life and food production...people who have no connection to it...take it from someone who does and is in pretty constant contact with super informed people running local a CSA's. It's a job that as far as I can see, most people could just not handle.

This is what agriculture is really like, and the kind of crap people who just want to grow good food for people have to struggle against. A lot of organic food you can buy at whole foods, local or not, might not hold a candle to what some guy 10 miles away is growing. He just might not be rich enough to pay for some fancy lable.

Now, all that aside...a lot of what goes on here is totally destructive either way. The runoff into the large lakes system here is bad either way. "Organic" is not going to make certain issues dissappear.

Monoculture is a problem. A lot of popular "health" foods people are buying today are not grown on polyculture farms. It is stands of "organic" plants row by row..usually clones of the same few strains of a species grafted together. Much of it is also flown in from the tropics wasting a lot of fuel so people can have coconuts and mangos etc. I dont think it's wrong...but Im not sure it's right either. If your anti oil and eating tropical foods in a northern latitude, there is at least some hippocracy there. I most definalty eat them.

The idea that eliminating meat is a better option for the environment is pretty easy to challenge. We always ate meat..so...why would the problem not actually be rather in how we approach the management of land entirley, instead of resorting to the elimination of a food source that
was argueably one of the most valued food sources throughout our entire evolution as a species? I dont and never have really seen that logic. I can get the moral issue with taking a life, but thats unrelated. Getting back to polycultural farming seems to me a much more grounded and natural solution.

My point is, I think people are pretty out of touch in general with where food comes from. This is in a time where more than ever people(usually removed, in cities etc) almost fetishize the farmer lifestyle and sometimes make connections between food, how it is advertized, and what that means about its footprint that are not accurate.

I have seen a lot of people come and go trying to do this type of work. Most people who idealize it, hate it and go work any other job they can find. It's hard work.

I think this is the thing though...a lot of people are really super hard working individuals. They work in oil and gas...police officers, doctors, bus drivers...societys worksdoes as much as it because people do work hard. At least here, people have social nets and a welfare system to support people only because a lot of people work hard. They have families to feed who depend on them. There is a smugness to the way this child addresses people, and issues. It's not hard for me to see why some people don't appreciate it. This child has never had a child of her own to feed, so she simply cannot know the struggles of people who do have children and families to feed.

I think people feel a bit insulted really, and Greta wont be the one to really inspire this in the people who need the inspiration. They wont listen to a kid lacking the life experience.

yes Jamie,depends what people meanwhen saying"organoic"ifthey mean "organic labelled food" or all organic food like that isn't using synthetic petro chemical fertilizers and insectides.. If when saying " Eat organic" they mean evenfood withno label but food grown as your greatgrandparents were all eating ( and growing back then ) cause before all food was "organic" it was just the way things is done.nowmost things is in fact tied up to petro chemical industry, we have to say if something traditionally done, but we shouldin fact just label food that has all those cancerous to earth and body prodcuts, and unsustainable practices.
We canargue about semanticsandIdo here, cause I know your point and I see it can be a problem.
I've grown a bit too and been asked " is it organic?", my answer was " I don't pay to get labelled "Organic" butyes, if you mean is it grown using organic product, in a sustainable andpermacultural fashion, then yes it is.

Jamie, we are neighbors. Also, for the last two month my cannabis oil has been from Okonagan Valley. There is a producer there called Okanagan Gold, very good stuff!!

Good post. "Eat local, organic, vegan" is a very common cliche in the counterculture. I feel like life is short. Eat what you want, eat what tastes good, within reason and moderation.

Awesome post Jamie, I think you make excellent points and I agree with you. I grew up in agriculture, in an area heavily influenced by outside interests, and I 100% understand that resentment.

I get why people in certain industries are turned off by Greta, but I think it misses the point to make the assumption that she's addressing working people. She's not talking to people like you and me. The problem is not those who work hard doing whatever job they can to put food on the table, whether that's on a monoculture farm spraying pesticides or an industrial slaughterhouse or extracting natural gas. The problem is that these industries refuse to evolve and develop more sustainable practices like you've mentioned, and they actively lobby to prevent other industries from competing. Profit is their bottom line and they'll do everything in their power to cut costs and outsource labor, regardless of what that means for their workers and the rest of us who depend on them.

I think Greta's point (or I should say that of the climate movement) is to those in power who get to make these calls. Our well-being as a society and as workers shouldn't be left to the whims of profiteers.

From the consumer side of things, on one hand I think people should enjoy their lives and eat what they want. And on the other hand we objectively know the impact of industrialized food production is detrimental. If you can afford to do so, supporting localized food systems is one of the most direct things I think you can do - at least with your dollars. Jamie hit the nail on the head and it's becoming increasingly difficult for small farmers to compete while utilizing sustainable practices like responsible land management. Helping to level the playing field however we can feels especially important right now.

I live in a rural agricultural area. We are surrounded by farms with livestock and vegetables. Most people raise chickens and grow their own gardens with worm castings and chicken manure and composting during off seasons. It's fairly easy to do what I advised where I live. I know it's hard to do such things in large cities. I'm not perfect and I cant say I do everything right but I am making better choices when and where there is a choice to be made because at the end of the day, you were given opportunities to make changes. It's only natural for people to get used to things and get stuck in habitual unconscious behavior which sadly seems to be most of the human population that aren't thinking for themselves.