You tell me what you fear you’ll lose without pollution and I’ll tell you what you’ll gain more of.

If you think you’ll connect les with family, you’ll actually connect more.

If you think the poor will be hurt the most, they’ll benefit the most.

If you’re worried about losing your job, you’ll find greater job security.

If you think your health or the economy will suffer, they’ll improve.

What am I getting at? Why do I believe you’ll experience the opposite of your fears?

Addiction makes you feel you’re getting more of something but overall you get less of it overall in life, outside brief spikes. Gamblers feel like winners when they’re actually losing. Meth addicts feel like they have more energy, but overall in life they have less. Social media addicts feel connected while they isolate themselves. You get the idea. I noticed the pattern, but researchers discovered it before.

We are addicted to what pollution and extraction bring us. We think we experience more nature because we think flying to the Amazon brings us to it, but we miss that we don’t see or connect with nature around us all the time, which contributes to our wrecking it.

Notice anything you think pollution brings you and I bet you’ll notice you experience spikes of it, like seeing your family a few times a year or health care at a hospital, but overall you see your family less or live less healthily than people in cultures that pollute less.

People tell me they don’t want to try living sustainably because they don’t want to give up things like visiting interesting places, spending time with family, their jobs, comfort, convenience, and what they associate requiring pollution. You’ll lose the spike and gain what you love more overall.

---

EDIT: A series of posts on artistic representations of this post

This post led to a series of posts showing artistic representations of its concepts from movies

• Part 2: Martin Scorcese on our relationship with pollution
• Part 3: Why sustainability is so hard and polluting so easy, from the moving Trainspotting
• Part 4: Why sustainability is so hard for you and polluting so easy, from the movie Requiem For a Dream

• ← 665: Tony Hiss: Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth
• 666: Mark Plotkin: Learning From Indigenous Cultures, the People Not Just Our Projections →