This kind of feels like a solution in search of a problem.

I mean, it’s neat that it’s possible to wirelessly charge a bicycle through its kickstand, but I don’t see many people being willing to pay $300 for it.

Absolutely not.

There are plenty of ways to encourage biodiversity in agriculture other then what this meme shows.

It used to be, for example, that big fields like this would be harvested by machines but surrounded by hedgerows, which were left uncultivated, serving as wind breaks and as habitat for many beneficial insects and animals.

That’s not possible in modern industrial agriculture, because Roundup and other herbicides and pesticides are too toxic - for corn or soybeans, for instance, they plant varieties immune to glyphosate and then dump so much glyphosate on the fields that everything else dies..

But organic farming techniques that don’t soak the soil in poisons can easily leave uncultivated space for the bugs and the birds - and even benefit from it, by, for example, planting native flowers that attract pollinators to the crops, or plants that provide habitat for insect predators that eat the bugs that would eat the crops. Or so on or so forth.

That being said, I think it’s likely the farm in this meme wouldn’t be profitable given current food prices.

But food in the United States is as cheap as it is because industrial agriculture (ie the poison spraying folks) is heavily subsidized by the US government and fueled by deliveries of oil and fertilizer and chemicals from a vast global supply chain.

And it’s not impossible that will change.

I mean, yes, it kind of does. Combine harvesters cut and flatten everything in a field, and kill any animals unfortunate enough to be in their path, which isn’t great for biodiversity.

In modern industrial agriculture, pesticides and poisons and traps kill other plants and animals anyway, so it’s not as relevant.

If you want biodiversity in a ryegrass field, the way this meme shows, you need perennial companion plants and an insect and small animal ecology. So you have to use less destructive forms of harvesting to avoid killing everything in the field.

I don’t know if there are less destructive mechanical harvesting processes available, but showing workers with scythes is a good shorthand to get the point across.

I think there might be a silver lining to this. One of the reasons American cars have been getting bigger and bigger and bigger is that CAFE fuel economy standards are more generous for bigger cars - so instead of building more efficient engines, manufacturers built cars with bigger footprints.

In the long run, I’d certainly want internal combustion engines phased out. But in the short term, we might get actual small pickups again 😆

This has always been one of those, “why the fuck don’t we do this already?” things.

Because the black roof lobby has spent a ton of money to keep roofs black.

Not kidding.

I’ve always found it funny that the right invented the term “virtue signaling”, in order to accuse liberals of spouting empty words to make themselves look good.

With conservatives, every accusation is a confession.

Toronto has restricted development in the ravines and other low-lying areas since 1954, when a freak hurricane caused severe flooding that killed dozens of people and washed away homes and bridges.

Today, the ravines include restored and artificial wetlands that soak up rainfall and mitigate flood risk.

There’s the most important part of the article, I think. It’s a lot easier to get buy-in for urban green spaces when the land involved is “useless” (from a capitalist standpoint) for development.

On an individual level, doing the right thing for the environment generally saves you money.

On a collective level, policies that are good for the environment generally save everyone money.

This should have been a no brainer for Democrat pols, but they couldn’t resist the temptation to give green-colored pork giveaways to big business and the 1% instead.

Yeah, raising cattle produces a ton of greenhouse gases from the usual industrial agriculture sources - growing feed for livestock, transporting animals, processing animals, etc.

And above that, cows specifically produce a lot of methane, and feeding them grain in feed lots produces even more methane than normal, because it’s not the diet they evolved to eat, and methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas it doubles the overall impact of cattle production.

If you eat an average Western diet, cutting beef from your diet would benefit the environment more than cutting any other single food, by far.

Tldr cow farts.

How would you feel about purely secular “mumbo jumbo” ceremonies meant to encourage care for the environment? Like, for example, an organized moment of silence before or after a cleanup (to stop and think about the natural area you’re cleaning up, listen to the birds/bugs/water, whatever)?

How can you say “be careful what you wish for, violent revolution never ends well for anarchists no matter who wins.” ? What about the outcome of the american revolutionary war ? What was it’s outcome. Was the outcome not good ?

The Revolutionary War is an excellent example of the winners of a violent revolution turning around and wielding state power against their former supporters - look up Shays’ Rebellion.

More generally, the outcome of the Revolutionary War was good for America’s landowning oligarchy. Not so good for ordinary white Americans. Definitely not good for slaves, nonwhites, and the Native Americans of the continent - particularly since one of the biggest reasons for revolution was that the colonists wanted to break their treaties with Native American tribes, kill them all and steal their land, and Britain wouldn’t let them.

Which just makes it even more important that people with the privilege to change their diet for the better - people with access to fresh food and home kitchens and time to cook - take advantage of that and change their diet.

And that people fight, through collective action, for policies that make it easier for more people to change their diet, such as community groceries and farmers’ markets in food deserts, higher minimum wages and better worker protections to give people more time and energy to cook, and so forth.

Recognizing that eating healthy is a privilege shouldn’t discourage you from eating healthy. It should encourage you to fight to get more people that privilege.

Green roofs do need more support. But think of it by percentages. A one-story house is going to need significantly more structural stability than a normal house if it wants to support a green roof. If your building is already built to support 10-20 stories, the additional weight (and cost) of the green roof and the reinforcement underneath is not as big a concern.

Personally, I would prefer solar panels on roofs and green spaces on the ground where the public can enjoy their benefits. But more green is better than less.

Pain - especially chronic pain - can shorten one’s life significantly, never mind one’s quality of life. And people die from giving birth. It’s possible to refuse those meds but I wouldn’t call it exactly practical.

But really, what possible and practicable mean differs from vegan to vegan, the same way “thou shalt not kill” differs among different Christians. And it’s the same with lab grown meat. There is a possible ethical consideration based on the sourcing of cell lines; some vegans may oppose lab grown meat based on that, other vegans might decide it’s perfectly fine, still others would personally refuse to eat it but encourage its development for the sake of harm mitigation. Who knows. Put five vegans in a room and you’ll have six different opinions.

The definition of veganism, from the Vegan Society:

Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment.

Please note the italics.

Living without modern medicine fits squarely within “not possible or practicable” because you can literally die without it. If you refuse vaccines or treatment for contagious diseases, it’s even more compelling, because you’re not only risking your life but the lives of others.

On the other hand, it is completely possible and practicable to live without lab-grown meat, so “were animals exploited to create this product” is a much more relevant consideration.

but I’ve got some hangups about our ability to make objective decisions about what is “in something/one’s best interests.”

Yeah, me too :/ It’s like every human (or animal) right - it has to be enforced by people, and people are pretty shitty. I don’t think that means we reject the principle, it means we put guardrails around it to try and prevent errors and abuses.

And I certainly agree: lab grown meat is far less heinous and morally offensive than factory farming. It involves a moral compromise for vegans, but, well, so does almost everything else. We can recognize both aspects.

I think of it this way: in what situations can we act on a human’s body without that human’s informed consent?

And one of those times is when an action needs to be taken for that human’s own good, and the human is unable to comprehend the situation enough to give informed consent. When a young child or an unconscious person needs medical treatment, for instance.

I think tracking or relocating wildlife would fall under that category. Does a bear understand why it’s not safe for it to break into people’s cars and eat their McDonald’s wrappers? No. Does the bear want to leave its territory and be shipped somewhere without cars full of delicious McDonald’s wrappers? Certainly not. But we can’t convince the bear to leave those delicious McDonald’s wrappers alone, so instead we relocate the bear, to protect both it and us.

On the other hand, harvesting a human’s cells for medical experiments? Does require informed consent, even if, as the history of Henrietta Lacks painfully shows, that requirement has often been ignored.

And harvesting cells to clone for food falls more on the medical experiments side of things than the “for their own good” side.

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Nature is amazing!

that will pivot farmers from meat production, and animal feed production to produce. we will need much less land to cultivate, so rewild them. IE, just abandon them and let nature reclaim it.

I would argue, for the US, we should not rewild, but rematriate. Return the land to the tribes we stole it from and let them decide what to do next.

After all, Native Americans were the keystone species in every biome in North America for tens of thousands of years. Restoring the pre-Colombian ecology requires humans to occupy and manage the land. The myth of human-free American wilderness is settler colonial bullshit.