When I was a kid the whole thing was "save the rainforests". Constant campaigns to stop chopping down trees, stop using wood, or else the amazon rainforest was going to no longer exist in X years. Constant fear mongering that we only had a few years to change course or else the rainforests were gone, and all the animals related to them would become extinct, etc.
The result of such campaigns was converting lots of everyday wood-based products, which were fully natural, fully renewable, to plastic-based, such as bags at grocery stores. It was celebrated and cheered. Then it turned out to be an absolute environmental disaster and now our planet and bodies are completely riddled with plastic.
It's interesting decades later to see the same people that created the plastic disaster in the first place finally coming full circle and trying to do something to (minimally) correct for the problems they caused. It's also a good example at how horrible we are at figuring out unknown unknowns, unintended consequences, etc. How easily so many people can get things so wrong after being so confident in their ideas.
When I was a kid the whole thing was "save the rainforests". Constant campaigns to stop chopping down trees, stop using wood, or else the amazon rainforest was going to no longer exist in X years. Constant fear mongering that we only had a few years to change course or else the rainforests were gone, and all the animals related to them would become extinct, etc.
The result of such campaigns was converting lots of everyday wood-based products, which were fully natural, fully renewable, to plastic-based, such as bags at grocery stores. It was celebrated and cheered. Then it turned out to be an absolute environmental disaster and now our planet and bodies are completely riddled with plastic.
It's interesting decades later to see the same people that created the plastic disaster in the first place finally coming full circle and trying to do something to (minimally) correct for the problems they caused. It's also a good example at how horrible we are at figuring out unknown unknowns, unintended consequences, etc. How easily so many people can get things so wrong after being so confident in their ideas.