RE: Isn't it a little scary how we take what the "authorities" tell us for granted as being the truth even in the face of catching them frequently in lies... Can we break the conditioning?

Good points.

I think by now I tend to look at disaster news with scepticism and not interpret local events as global. It seems to be "fashionable" now to attribute every flood, fire, storm or other naturally occurring weather event to the end of the world. Since my childhood I have heard at the end of animal or nature documentaries "But if man does not stop destroying the natural habitat...". This is where you can then insert a fear scenario. When I was little, this affected me terribly and of course I believed everything.

One should probably not underestimate how many adults of today have taken the fears of their childhood with them and unconsciously feel endangered with every new piece of scary news.

If I were to compare the number of these negative contents with what all these people who were so affected then did in reality, one would think that no one would take it so seriously anyway. When I made my own decision not to fly on holiday any more, I got the reaction on the one hand that this was probably exaggerated and that since I only had a "very small carbon footprint" anyway, flying once was like not flying at all. Another friend chided me for looking at the wrong danger, saying that it was factory farming that was responsible for the increase in CO2 and that I should eat no or less meat. An aggressive atmosphere developed without me thinking to contribute and I changed the subject.

My mistake was probably to have chosen a politically correct sounding reason for my unwillingness to get on a plane (I won't use it again as an argument).

If the normal person had actually investigated further, he would inevitably have come across the reasoning that the so-called CO2 footprint is very high simply due to the fact that every household has to heat, and everything else that one avoids is rather marginal in comparison. Whether this is true or not, I don't know.

I have refrained from forming a firm opinion on this, because obviously I lack the knowledge. And I don't think anyone else has a comprehensive knowledge of what factors actually lead to a changing earth's atmosphere that brings us death or catastrophic living conditions.

But one thing seems clear to me: the way people live in metropolises, they suffer from the lack of plant and animal life. It is man's pain to see himself cut off from the rest of planetary life, to see himself surrounded by streets and tall buildings, by concrete surfaces. Man treats animals, insects and plants like troublemakers that he wants out of sight. Even the front gardens and pavements in rural areas look like they have been vacuumed and a real wasteland and lack of ideas about gardening and maintenance is visible.

I think that despite all the alleged education, people tend to be as superstitious and gullible as ever. I count myself among them, but in the course of the last few years I have learned that I can and will change that. Ultimately, one can only concern oneself with what affects one and seems to be locally attainable and influenceable.

I would be happy if the city administration would finally stop constantly blowing away the undergrowth in the parks and leaving the ground bare. The smallest creatures and small animals live from and in the undergrowth. If home and garden owners would make their gardens alive and not plant them with uniform hedges and boxwood bushes where bees, bumblebees and butterflies find no nectar. One tries to be a role model oneself. We planted a flower meadow in front of my brother's house this summer and various species, but people misunderstand such growth as weeds and get upset when the kerbs crack or the pavement in front of their own house is "untidy".

People constantly look at the big and the sensational, but don't care at all about the small and the detail. They go demonstrating for "a better climate", but in their private lives they spare any effort to use resources sparingly. Now, all that said, I am the first to admit that my use of resources is not ideal either, that in many ways I am not a do-gooder but a user. It is the world I live in and therefore to make a murder pit out of my heart and find culprits out there is not to be my business. I don't want to save the world, world-saving efforts seem more harmful than useful to me.