Reply #27: A contradiction here. [View All]

[Radical Activist]

You wrote that people should: "Move to the city, get rid of your car, don't eat meat, don't fly, and work fewer hours."

Those are all decisions the average working poor or lower middle class person can't make simply based on environmental concerns. Where they live and work is based on whether they can afford to move and the fact that in most cities you can't keep a job if you don't have a car. So what you're really saying is that you have to be in the upper middle class with some financial freedom in order to make the financial decisions to be a good environmentalist.

I have gotten many emails (saving paper!) from the Sierra Club suggesting ways to reduce my consumption of energy and reduce my environmental impact. They may not be everything you would like to see but asking the average person to quit their job, sell their home and leave their family to move to a bigger city they don't like for the sake of the environmental is pretty unrealistic to say the least. You have to get people started with smaller steps.