When I read other comments about birds obscuring the sky, fishes you could caught by hand, etc. It seemed unreal, almost magical. A fairy tale on some Westeros-like world.
If we can use this narrative to astonish people, and make them get perspective on what should be, it can be a powerful message.
"Eat less meat", "recycle", "use less the car/plane" are not really sexy. They are constraints.
"Look how amazing things used to be before we did this", however, is much more inspirational.
I think it needs a multi-pronged approach. Inspiration is a great start, but it's fairly weak against a marketing machine spending billions inventing more nonexistent problems and needs.
We need to rediscover collective action, activism of the get off facebook and into the street to make someone's life difficult variety, regulation as a good thing (food safety laws, clean air acts, child labour laws etc), and stop pretending the market has the solution to everything.
That's a slightly challenging wishlist especially if we don't want to give up all the lifestyle in the process. :)
The almost insolvable problem we have is everyone 60 or younger grew up with throwaway consumerism as "normal". My parents generation didn't. They had a fraction of my generation's environmental impact without any efforts to environmentalism. Simply they expected to buy something once then repair it if need be and replace when broken beyond repair. Not when something a little better gets released.
For all the huge increase in general awareness of the environment, when in the 80s the environment was something of the fringe, we're destroying it at an ever increasing rate. I'm not optimistic.
[0] https://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/horseshoe-crabs-went-fertil...