5.4 Earths!? Environmental footprint calculator results

[Ultralight]

Unfortunately, IMO, what the trying accomplished was to create a conservative backlash of money-worshiping, materialistic mindlessness we're still digging out from under. But yes, we did try.

I think that every generation tries, or rather some portion of every generation tries. Thus far: All have failed!

[ApatheticNoMore]

I generally find the Boomers the hardest of all generations to personally relate to, I just vibrate on a very different frequency, it's very alien to me. Even though I'm very hippy idealist at heart and like some of the ideas from that era.

But it's not any generation's fault entirely, it's always been a stacked desk (the odds are long, the path uphill, best to understand that). They had advertising, hippies had communes, enough said. They had assassinations (just civil rights leaders alone), hippies had protests.

Some interesting stuff has been written on how the social (and economic) support structure for such radical change didn't exist. It's easy to be a hippy on a college campus where such structures do exist (or did to some degree then), but that's one phase of life, people don't stay on college campuses, they get jobs, they get married, some will have kids, a structure to support radical change given that is what was needed some say.

[Ultralight]

I get along with the unrepentant 60s radicals pretty well. But they are few and far between.

[kib]

I'm a tail end boomer, one of the last years. Not crazy about the designation because it spans such a long time, technically my mother could have been a boomer too, and if I was a 60's radical, I was a 5 year old one, not terribly impactive on the movement.



I agree with the idea that the social support wasn't in place to implement a lot of lasting change - and we did get some changes, the 1970's women's movement got its start with the idea of upending social norms. The fact that there wasn't support for radical economic overhaul proposed by the hippies can probably be laid at the feet of the generation my parents were actually part of, I think it was both their fear of the conditions during the WWII and the Depression, combined with the post war prosperity boom, that made them rise up against the idea of Less is More. Too bad.

[catherine]

I generally find the Boomers the hardest of all generations to personally relate to, I just vibrate on a very different frequency, it's very alien to me.

Really? How so? As a full-blown Baby Boomer (b.1952, came of age with Beatles, civil rights, hippie counterculture, MLK/RFK, moon landing, Vietnam), I'm always interested in learning how younger generations relate to "my kind"

[Ultralight]

I am a tail-end Gen Xer.

[Alan]

I'm a boomer, born during Ike's first term. I'm often amused by people asserting people like me somehow damage them by rising above my humble beginnings. If you haven't lived in a house without running water, your only source of heat being a dirty coal stove in the center of the house, no insulation in the walls or floors and being able to see through the floors to the ground below, whole families sleeping in the same bed during winter in order to share body heat, no opportunity or ability to travel outside the circle of your own poverty and despair until you become old enough to take responsibility for yourself. We had a very small environmental footprint living that way, now, it's much bigger, and by design.

If you've never been there, don't expect me to agree that I should return to a reality you've never experienced.

[kib]

I'm not suggesting you return to that reality. But I think the reality for people living the good life in the 50's, with their little Levittown houses and their one car and one tv, was a pretty nice set up with a significantly smaller footprint. With modern technology we could probably cut that energy and resource use by at least 25%. I could see a world like that, although I wouldn't want the social constraints of the era.

[Ultralight]

There is only so much good stuff to go around...

[kib]

Perhaps not. go check out "paradise or oblivion". http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/paradise-oblivion/