You can’t Abstain your way to a Better World.
The Burger still gets made, even if you go Vegan. If you don’t buy it, it just winds up in the trash. If you want to do something meaningful about waste, you need legislation: It must become a crime to waste food in those ways.
If you care about Animal Cruelty in Factory Farms, you need to get legislation passed. It must become a crime to mistreat animals in those ways, and when malfeasances occurs, the onus of responsibility for those crimes must fall upon wealthy shoulders. That, also, requires legislation. It requires regulations, and regulators.
The largest source of Microplastics is wear and tear on automobile tires. It doesn’t matter what brand of shampoo you buy. It doesn’t matter which company you support with your dollar. The issue of Public Transit is too large-scale to be handled at anything less than the municipal level.
It’s not enough to just not participate in society
If you want the world to Change, you must leverage the mechanisms of political power.
You need Government.
STOP PROPOSING INDIVIDUAL SOLUTIONS TO COLLECTIVE PROBLEMS
individual and grassroots activism and campaigns are essential starting points, but they can only scratch the surface alone. they get us social capital and leverage and education and fundraising -- those resources must then be applied upon on the large important actors such as governments and corporations.
getting 1000 new people doing Meatless Mondays is hardly noticeable, but if 100 of those people join a mailing list and 10 out of them go to the governor's office to convince her to block the expansion of a local factory farm -- that can be potential actualizing into effective change.
