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Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have
Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have | Tatiana Schlossberg
33 posts | 4 read | 3 to read
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JenniferEgnor
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We have to vote. Vote for people who offer meaningful policies, and make sure they are achieved. If they don‘t, vote for someone else who will.

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JenniferEgnor
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The countries and communities that have contributed least to climate change and pollution will be the most affected. That is an injustice.

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JenniferEgnor
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Around the world, people living in poverty suffered most from climate change. Poor countries are often in places with limited natural resources to begin with – like water or fertile land – or where the wealth has been taken out by Western colonizers and corporate interests. Or they are extreme environments to begin with.

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JenniferEgnor
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If you care about justice, you care about climate change and pollution. If you want to fight inequality, you have to fight climate change, too. Already, the consequences of climate change disproportionately affect low-income communities and people of color in this country. That‘s largely because of centuries of injustice that have kept wealth from these communities, and directly or indirectly prevented them from living in less perilous places

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JenniferEgnor
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(When politicians, business leaders and others say that a green transition is too expensive, ask them...)
Why wouldn‘t you just try, in case (almost) all the scientists are right?
Does it matter how much anything costs if you‘re dead and Miami is underwater?

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JenniferEgnor
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(When politicians, business leaders and others say that a green transition is too expensive, ask them…)
Couldn‘t mitigating climate change be a way to make money—by building new infrastructure, developing new technologies, providing new services, and avoiding chronic health costs, such as asthma, which can be caused by fossil fuel pollution?

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JenniferEgnor
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(When politicians, business leaders, and others say that a green transition is too expensive, ask them...)
Won‘t it be more expensive to lose cities to sea level rise and fight forest fires and deal with refugee crisis spurred by drought and famine and other disasters?

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JenniferEgnor
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In the name of convenience or immediate gratification or profit, we‘ve created a world where we use resources because we can, with little attention paid to our waste and the problem it creates. We‘ve imagined that our actions are not connected to each other, as if we don‘t live on one planet with one ocean and one atmosphere, one Arctic and one Antarctic.

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JenniferEgnor
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It made me think again that there is no corner of the earth that our actions don‘t affect, and that our indifference to the value of our resources and to their limits threatens everything, including our own success and survival.

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JenniferEgnor
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...The problem is that America moves itself by car and not by public transportation or bicycles or walking, because so much of our built environment was built when the car existed, and so our society is largely organized around the car.

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JenniferEgnor
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So really, once again, the problem is us.

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JenniferEgnor
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Differing effects of pollution are created by inequality, and pollution exacerbates unequal dynamics by creating inequality of health outcomes, based solely on where we live, itself often a result of the historical legacy of racism.

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JenniferEgnor
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Black carbon may be responsible for more than 30% of the warming in the Arctic, which is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world; it is also driving the melting of Himalayan glaciers and may also be having an effect on the reduction of the snow pack in the Pacific Northwest.

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JenniferEgnor
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It‘s not just the carbon that escapes from the soil when these trees are cut down, or the loss of future carbon sequestration, or the wholesale destruction of native and biologically important ecosystems in favor of corporate interests.

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JenniferEgnor
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The desert is getting bigger – estimates suggest that, between Mongolia and China, the desert is growing by somewhere between 900 and 1,500 square miles every year—partly because of climate change, partly because of goats. Cashmere goats.

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JenniferEgnor
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We all need to focus on making and buying clothing that doesn‘t exact such a heavy toll on the environment—our clothes will be less expensive and last longer, and we will have to pay less, in the end, for the ultimate costs of pollution, climate change, and disease.

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JenniferEgnor
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We already know that it is everywhere: microfibers and other forms of microplastics are in Arctic sea ice; plastic has been found on top of a glacier in North Cascades National Park in Washington State, on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific, in the Mariana Trench, and in Antarctica. What does this say about us?

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JenniferEgnor
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Athleisure ostensibly is designed for (or at least marketed to) people who care about the outdoors or being outside or at least improving their bodies, which can only truly happen in a world with clean air and water, a world where all bodies are temples, hand – sculpted from the finest marble.

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JenniferEgnor
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In the American context, denim grew up with America. It was there, and even critical, during expansion across the continent, linked with a singularly extractive economy and built upon the backs of enslaved people and the genocide of indigenous peoples. That may sound hyperbolic for a simple pair of pants, but it‘s true.

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JenniferEgnor
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In the last few years, it seems like there has been a lot of focus on skin care and self-care, and I‘m curious as to why we want to live forever with perfect skin at the precise moment that the world is ending…?

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JenniferEgnor
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...our disregard for the environment in order to feed ourselves, as if we won‘t continue to need clean water, healthy soil, pollinating insects if we want to keep eating. The relentless plunder of the oceans isn‘t actually all that different from the way we treat the other natural resources the feed us – as if they are limitless and eternal and unaffected by how poorly we treat them. They‘re not.

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JenniferEgnor
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As I said, I don‘t like/am afraid of fish because they are slippery and therefore not to be trusted, but I am fully in awe of the oceans. Without them, the planet would already be on fire; they are mysterious and unknowable; it feels good to swim.

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JenniferEgnor
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I love apples. As with strawberries, I have eaten apples until I got a rash. I‘m not allergic – I just ate that many apples. And yet, I cannot be stopped.

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JenniferEgnor
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The negative effects (pollution, emissions, etc.) of food production aren‘t reflected in the cost of food, but we are the ones who end up paying for them, in the form of health effects and climate change and pollution.

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JenniferEgnor
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In the future, farmers may increasingly come to rely on seed banks as the twin forces of industrialized agriculture and climate change wipe out crops or entire species.

Louise If you have the chance, check out the documentary called SEED: The Untold Story, by Collective Eye Films. It is excellent! The filmmakers travel around the world interviewing people who are working to protect the world‘s seed stock and seed diversity. (edited) 4y
JenniferEgnor @Louise thanks, I will! 4y
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JenniferEgnor
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We grow so much corn partly because corn is amazing. Native peoples in Mexico cultivated corn between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago, indigenous groups throughout the Americas planted it for generations, and without corn, (without the Wampanoags, who taught them how to grow, harvest it), English settlers in 17th century Massachusetts would not have survived.

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JenniferEgnor
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You eat so much of it, you don‘t even know. On fact, Americans eat so much corn—in the from of meat (the food our good eats), syrup, oils, and alcohol—that according to scientists, on a molecular level, Americans are basically “corn chips with legs.”

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JenniferEgnor
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We grow so much corn that climate change in the Corn Belt, which covers most of the Midwest, is happening at a different rate and with different effects than everywhere else on earth, in defiance of all the best and most precise models that scientists have come up with.

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JenniferEgnor
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How did we end up in a country where it makes sense, in terms of the market or in the way we grow food, to throw away about one-third of what we produce? It‘s the way we label food, the way we want food to look, and the way we grow food, too.

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JenniferEgnor
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Just like that, gold becomes worthless, electricity becomes an afterthought, exposure to toxic chemicals and dangerous working conditions become justified. The Internet and our technological devices aren‘t inherently problematic—it‘s how we use them that‘s the problem.

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JenniferEgnor
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In the end, the way we throw away our devices is sort of like how we use them—with little regard for their inherent value, the resources required to make and power them, or how our individual actions spread beyond our little corner of the universe.

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JenniferEgnor
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The Internet wasn‘t originally designed to do what we now use it for: shopping, watching movies, social networking, ripping each other apart, hacking each other‘s elections.

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TheBookStacker
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I would say this is required reading for everyone, not just for me for graduate school. Currently listening to today‘s episode of The Daily about the Amazon rainforest and reading this. Making a list of habits I can change in my daily life to reduce my carbon footprint.

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