It's pesticides. It's pollution. This isn't complicated.

What's coming? Ecological collapse. That's what happens when you kill all the pollinators, when you kill all base prey animals.

None of this is complicated, nor unforseen. We've known this about pollution and pesticides for decades, even longer when it comes to climate change.

The owning/ruling class is directly responsible for the overwhelming majority of the pollution and environmental destruction on the planet. This is not complicated.

And if you wiped them out, then wouldn't a functionally identical class take their place? There's no us vs. them, them is us.

The voting class is responsible for always wanting to “save the mother and the orphan” (metaphor, but it’s a “let’s save everyone, allow everyone to prosper, increase wages and let everyone massively live in consumerism” attitude), effectively massively overpopulating the earth, requiring more concrete poured in cities and even more poured concrete in tourism because their home city is unbearable, and all of it requiring, in a word, mass industry.

But somehow it’s the industry that’s at fault.

But “how do you dare say no to more humans!” is somehow at fault. I get it, we can be 10bn if we all ate crickets, but surprise, food is not even the reason why land gets urbanized and overexploited and polluted. Plus, creating more high-density humans, the kind who never sees any patch of earth, the kind who believes travelling across the world to see Kylie Minogue in a casino and buy some flamboyant clothes, is the best way to get voters who understand and care nothing to nature.

Ruling class just executed what you wanted. Guess what, what we want is to leave no human behind, help everyone, and raise them all to high levels of consumerism, whether in the West or in the third world. I really don’t see how the ruling class has any stake in pollution. Every time they try to get us to reduce our lifestyle, we vote them out.

Yeah you can account for it that way, but the people who buy the products and use the services the owning class owns and operates are indirectly responsible, so individual action is very much relevant!

I should make it clear that I don't see myself as a model ecological homeowner, but I do feel that I am trying. I was trying to point out that I can't even make a difference as an individual versus other individuals, so I feel individuals have no hope competing against industrial environmental damage. I feel like I already notice less bees and butterflies compared to last year. I don't think I have even seen a butterfly this year.

In terms of what corporations, just open the so-called phone book with your eyes closed and point. Our worship of scale has us destroying the environment at scale.

What's coming is more headlines like the one here and what the other commenter mentioned of ecological collapse. Without pollinators, how will we grow food?

The point really is that individual action is sisyphean. The energy is too diffuse because the vast majority of people lack any real power or even real autonomy over their lives.

The only way the things that were done by mass action can be undone is through mass action. Who are the people who can invoke mass action? Basically there’s only one answer: governments.

Maybe if governments hadnt spent the last 60 years destroying labor movements (at the behest of corporations) there would be another option. But here we are in the year of our lord 2023 after decades of successful union busting.