Feeling a Little Guilty for Over-Consumptive Habits? Blame it on the Breeders

[wtmusic]

A Chinese factory worker operates a loom at a textile manufacturing factory in Beijing.

"Every society has topics it does not discuss. These are the issues which challenge its comfortable assumptions. They are the ones that remind us of mortality, which threaten the continuity we anticipate, which expose our various beliefs as irreconcilable.

Among them are the facts which sink the cosy assertion, that (in David Cameron's words) "there need not be a tension between green and growth".

At a reception in London recently I met an extremely rich woman, who lives, as most people with similar levels of wealth do, in an almost comically unsustainable fashion: jetting between various homes and resorts in one long turbo-charged holiday. When I told her what I did, she responded: "Oh I agree, the environment is so important. I'm crazy about recycling." But the real problem, she explained, was 'people breeding too much'."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2013/apr/12/escalating-consumption

[CreekDog]

1. The intolerant title is NOT the title of the article, but is your own handiwork

"breeders" really?

[phantom power]

2. mental image

[GliderGuider]

3. Graphic illustration:

The blue line is people, the red line is the world's consumption of industrial energy, divided up into 125-watt human-sized chunks. Energy consumption is the foundation for all other types of consumption, and acts as a good proxy for human planetary damage. George has this one right.