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Moving From Wasteful To Worthy
Can America Really Prosper By Investing So Heavily In Garbage, Mental Illness, and Idiocy?
“Human activity is putting unprecedented stress on Earth’s life-giving systems,” says Kate Raworth in Doughnut Economics. “Global average temperature has already risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius, and we are on track for an increase of almost 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, threatening a scale and intensity of floods, droughts, storms and sea-level rise that humanity has never before witnessed. Around 40 percent of the world’s agricultural land is now seriously degraded, and by 2025 two out of three people worldwide will live in water-stressed regions. Meanwhile over 80 percent of the world’s fisheries are fully or over-exploited and a refuse truck’s worth of plastic is dumped into the ocean every minute: at this rate, by 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the sea.”
Granted, plastic is an amazing material. Drawn from ancient sunlight, plastic will last longer than most any other human creation, with some of it lasting for several hundred years before breaking down and rejoining the natural cycle of life. However, as brilliant as it may have seemed at the time, looking at it through the big picture of time, the idea to make disposable products out of non-disposable material was nothing short of sheer idiocy.
