Well, this response seems to be very much in line with what I was talking about. People love to claim that the world is about to end -- unless, of course, we (but not other nations) volunteer to return to primitivism. Like the Amish, did you say?? seriously?? The Amish couldn't function if it were not that EVERYONE ELSE in our society makes their way of living possible by the very inventions that they wont use. Its a gesture on their part. At best.
And the same is true for all the fashionable eco-enthusiasts who suppose that if they ride bicycles everywhere, the food they eat must have arrived on the store shelves by magic or thanks to deliveries that were also made by some teamster peddling a bicycle.
It's just a part of the reason I struggle to take the climate change arguments very seriously. The people who shout the loudest tend not to practice what they preach and the high priests of the climate change religion are among the worst offenders. When people who talk of the problem of worsening hurricanes and rising sea levels own oceanfront property I wonder what they must know that they aren't telling the rest of us.
The irony I really notice yet the global warming enthusiasts seem to overlook, is the way the great and the good travel (first class, with armies of hangers-on, obviously) to exotic locations to discuss ways to tell the rest of us that our annual trip (economy class, to places far less exotic) is going to have to be sacrificed on their altar so that, well, they can continue to live it large over the rest of us. I sometimes wonder whether they learned from those who push the prosperity gospel in the churches.
I do think the Amish could continue to survive, albeit with some changes, without many of the things the rest of us use. Yes, you see the Amish in the grocery stores taking advantage of supplies that presumably didn't arrive on the back of a buggy. But to a large extent I think they would get by if they had to be a lot more self-sufficient. Certainly they would manage better than the rest of us.
As far as a more environmentally friendly lifestyle is concerned, I know at least some people who do consider the concept of "food miles", i.e. how far the food has travelled from where it was produced to their home. The thinking there is that if potatoes are grown on a farm in northern Delaware and then shipped to southern Delaware where they are bought and eaten by someone who lives 10 miles from the store, the total environmental impact is much lower than if that same person went to the same store to buy potatoes that were grown in Idaho. Looking at the whole picture like that makes sense if you want to take steps to reduce your overall environmental impact. But unless you're going to look at the total picture so much is lost - it's akin to the person who buys an electric vehicle because it "produces no emissions", forgetting that the electricity that charges the battery doesn't appear by magic and effectively all they have done is shift the emissions elsewhere. If you ride a bicycle to do your grocery shopping you will make a small difference, albeit one that is dwarfed by the construction of a single new power plant.
Much of the process seems to focus on the wrong steps. It was a long time ago I heard the phrase "reduce, refill, reuse, recycle". There seems to be more and more focus on recycling but essentially what that does is shift the burden onto the end user - the likes of you and I. It makes more sense to reuse and refill containers than throw them out to be recycled, especially when many containers could be reused easily. And reducing usage in the first place makes more sense still. It reminds me of how, as a child, I'd go to the local store (on foot, obviously) and buy a quarter-pound of my preferred candy. The individual pieces were loose, and would be weighed out and put into a paper bag. That was it - the packaging for half a pound of candy was one single paper bag (if you wanted more than half a pound it needed - horror - a SECOND paper bag). Now you buy a box of candy where each piece is individually wrapped in plastic, then the collection is put inside a plastic bag, inside a cardboard box, which is then wrapped in plastic. And of course it falls on the end-user to dispose of all this unwanted packaging. It seems the corporations are using more and more material to package their products which then shuffles down the chain and the end consumer is told to be a good little serf and run along (at their expense) to handle all this unwanted stuff. And the ironic part is that the corporations are the ones gushing about their corporate environmental responsibilities.
