Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
I'm with Balto on this one; we've got bigger fish to fry.
People live longer than ever, so whatever harm we are doing to the environment isn't counteracting the progress we're making in standards of living and medical care.
A real threat is heart disease and type II diabetes. If the lifespan average ever decreases, you can bet it's due to obesity and diet, and not microplastics, GMO, or global warming.
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As with most things, it depends on your perspective.
Short-term, sure, heart disease is a more proximate problem than some environmental pollution if our goal is keeping currently-living humans alive. But long-term, we are at risk of making that environment uninhabitable in large swaths to humans as a whole, and that risk increases with every resource-consuming, pollution-producing human life we prolong (say, by mitigating the consequences of heart disease)--good for the individual in the short-term, bad for the species in the long-term. To suggest that because someone like RedDevil concerns himself with an issue of the latter (and note that he didn't say
anything about the former; he could be fighting heart disease or any number of the "bigger [by which you mean "more-proximate"] fish" just as avidly, for all we know) he is a victim of "pollution propaganda," as Balto put it, seems pretty knee-jerk reactionary to me.