Who's responsible for this? Is it some big cultural mindset? Or is it the individual choices each of us makes everyday? The answer is both i guess. But they aren't seperate, the culture of consumption is simply the total of our individual choices. Each of us cooperates differently and in different amounts, from the hermit-desert rat type who lives off grid and walks to the nearest trading post once a month to the suit wearing freeway commuters waiting out another traffic jam in their air-conditioned cocoon.
Each of us performs a conscious or sub-conscious cost/benefit analysis whose output we use to maximize the mojo of our moments. Defining costs and benefits then is central to maximizing our individual mojos. Each of us solves the problem slightly different because of how our unique pasts have shaped our present worldview, that worldview is what we use to assign weights to different costs and benefits. The one thing we all share is the difficulty of our time frame.
We rogue primates seldom have any connection to deep timeframes, we have affinity or real empathy for about the 5 generations we meet in our lives, our grandparent's-our parent's-our's-our children's-our grandchildren's. These temporal blinders we all have that focus us so narrowly in time allow us to externalize the full costs of our actions somewhere into the future beyond our circle of empathy while apparently gaining the full benefits of those actions in the here and now. The Geological Record study, at least for a moment, has re-opened my focus to a grander time scale and re-validated my evolving inner desert rat.
'Unprecedented Rapidity of CO2' Causing Worst Ocean Acidification in 300 Million Years - The Earth's oceans are becoming more acidic at a faster rate than at any time in the past 300 million years due to increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, a new study shows.
