Climate Reality Leadership Training garbage
You can’t stop the global heroin trade if you’re worried about your own supply. This post is about people who are addicted, perhaps without realizing it or in denial, to behavior causing others to suffer and die finding themselves impotent to change others. They haven’t tried to change themselves so they don’t know what change takes. Would you take piano lessons from someone who read a lot of books on music theory but never played a scale, let alone music?
I wrote before about attending Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Training. I took these pictures to illustrate how (as best I can tell) most attendees weren’t trying to live sustainably.
Maybe it wasn’t most people, but plenty of attendees flew in, including from other continents. Probably the bins below, showing plenty of needless disposable stuff in one of the many sets of waste bins, contained an order of magnitude less than at a typical conference, but that paying for the goods that came in unnecessary packaging still funded future extraction of fossil fuels and that plastic will last centuries.
I didn’t go out of my way, but each time I passed, I found food in they recycling or landfill bins, recyclables in the compost or landfill bins, and landfill waste in the compost and recycling bins. I moved some into the right bins, but couldn’t keep up with the “climate leaders” getting it wrong.
Here was a typical table with lots of disposable stuff. People with multiple phones. I think the environmental impact of making a cell phone is near that of making a car.
Overall, I just didn’t see sustainability as a goal among participants. The group’s culture seemed to frame sustainability as something government would achieve while ordinary people would continue to live unsustainably. I think the group’s culture considered sustainability a burden. Somehow they acted and communicated that the idea of them living sustainably would harm people in the global south.
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