I used too much energy growing this crop
I’ve been around DailyKos since 2003, I haven’t posted for really long time, but I used to have a little bit of clout back in the day.
I recently tried to figure out how to concisely express the idea of a species causing it’s own extinction and realized the there is no way of using a word or phrase for species wide suicide because it’s never happened. I thought about it for a while, and realized that only one species is capable of destroying itself.
I’ve known a few individuals that have killed themselves, and the reasons for quitting always seemed trivial. Debt, failure, and loneliness all suck but they aren’t worth killing or dying for.
Humanity is killing itself for convenience, comfort, and vanity. Whether it’s flying instead of driving, or driving instead of walking, or eating take out instead of cooking, Americans make decisions every day that destroy the planet because it’s convenient. I think we should come up with a pithy descriptor- maybe lazy assholes apocalypse. Laa, laa, laa all the way home.
We currently use about 1% of our electricity in the United States to grow cannabis. Every pound of cannabis could be grown outside with the sun, but we consume billions of joules because we need to hide the fact that Americans smoke a lot of weed. I have grown literally tons of weed indoors. If every person had a global warming report card, growing weed gives me a F. Every pound I grew was like driving a Camry 2500 miles on the highway — a greenhouse gas disaster. I’ve stopped growing weight indoors and am working towards growing weed outdoors exclusively.
We build cities and neighborhoods without side walks or the density to support walking or biking. We are literally building our tombs and we are doing it because density is inconvenient. Walking takes time and sometimes the weather is uncomfortable. Lazy, weak, pathetic.………
Every person needs to first recognize that they destroy by living, but can mitigate that destruction by thinking about how they exist. If every American could plant ten trees a year, walk a hundred miles instead of driving those miles, and only eat a pound of meat a week, we can save ourselves and the other species that live today. We don’t have to be vegans (they help the averages) and we can drive cars and trucks. We need to walk more. We need to make our lives smaller.
We will have more shady places to sit as the planet heats up and we will have a chance to survive if we make some simple changes or we all die.
Earth will be fine and a great place for life to thrive regardless of the decisions that humanity makes in the next twenty-five years. It’s actually a binary choice. Humanity survives going forward or humanity destroys itself and millions of other species as we go extinct. The suns got another four to six billion years and Earth is a planet made for life — it won’t be a dead planet, just a planet without Homo sapiens.
