Children? Do children go to festivals ? Have I blamed them for the environment ? Just that you have more faith in the younger generation than I do. Will they turn their back on computers, tvs, cars , travel etc as they get older ? I doubt it. Change will hopefully come from technological advances in these areas, though modern technology also causes it's own problems. When I was 30 you got a phone, tv etc and kept them till they broke , generally ten or twenty years later. I had a fridge that I gave to someone and 30 years later it was still working. Now when a mobile phone contract runs out after two years, the phone gets replaced. Most items are made with built in obsolescence. The individual units probably use a lot less power, but few things now seem to last.
If people want to donate tents, why don't they take them home and donate them? Far more likely that they are being donated because they had to find something to do with them after peopled couldn't be bothered to take them home.
As for the EU, not totally to blame, but there never used to be hundreds of thousands of trucks trundling things in and out the country. Food was seasonal, and you eat what was in season. Raw materials would be bought in, and manufacturing and sales took place in one area. The EU's open borders have encouraged manufacturers to trundle parts backwards and forwards round Europe. Decimated our manufacturing too, which is probably not a point for this thread.
You highlight the problem with the Climate Change argument. This situation has been developing over many many decades.....you could argue since the birth of the Industrial Revolution, so in that respect we are all to blame, not age groups, or political institutions, everyone has contributed in some way.
I personally think that there is so much smoke and mirrors on certain aspects of Climate Change that the true picture is distorted. It really should be called environment change.
In my little sphere of work, which has been one of the biggest producers of CO2, I can assure you that in most of the industrialized world, emissions (including CO2 Nox SO2,) from electricity generation have been reduced massively, in the case of SO2, by 95%.
Most of our domestic electrical gadgets are now significantly more energy efficient too, so whilst we have more of them, our electrical demand on the system has steadily fallen, so less generation required, meaning less pollution.
Cars are more efficient, so despite many more vehicles being on the road, the net emission effect is significantly better than it was 30 years ago, similarly with the air industry.
In fact the UK CO2 footprint is around half of what it was in 1990.
Unfortunately whilst the 'centerpiece' polluters have stepped up their game, the throw away culture of life today cause significant other problems that have, until recently, been ignored.
Whilst recycling is improving, much of our waste still goes to landfill, the net result being methane is generated and released into the atmosphere. Methane is 4 times more polluting than CO2. There are other issues, pollutant run off into rivers.
We can reduce landfill significantly by incorporating local processing centres that use Pyrolysis technology, those process all exist are proven and effective, helping to improve the environment, even if they are not perfect.
These will only be short term needs in any case as technology and lifestyle starts to naturally reduce waste.
More worrying and what we as humans don't seem to be able to grasp is the other more damaging aspects of our existence.
The Rain Forests are being cleared at alarming rates, the burning effectively negating the work done in the power, aviation and car industries in reducing emissions, and of course we are still decimating natural habitat, dumping waste into oceans causing further imbalances in the natural world,
Technology can only take us so far, at some point it comes down to individual behavior, and allowing the natural world to be so wantonly destroyed has to be a priority change for humans.
Thankfully it seems like the younger generations are more aware of this than the older ones, and we all know what happens when the 'will of the people' is expressed, the people who exert power tend to listen. Hopefully this will be the case this time around....except Trump.
Bottom line is, every individual has a duty to ensure his or her polluting footprint is minimized, or eradicated. It really isn't difficult to do with a little research, achieving a balance is not difficult, and doesn't require living in a brightly painted bus in a forest clearing with no showers or hairdressers with lots of other outcasts.
It can be easliy done in any town, city or village in the industrialized world.
As the saying goes....every little helps!!
And yes children go to festivals......I dragged mine along to Download on many occasions....I'm not sure about the music, but they loved the mud!!
