Every time I turn over the top layer of compost in a year and see what has "grown", it never ceases to fascinate me how much a family of four and a small garden can produce in a year.
Nature will make two to three cubic meters of super quality potting soil from this - clean, almost without work and, as they like to say today, with an absolutely zero carbon footprint. (But to be fair, smoldering also produces CO2 of course, but that's completely natural.)
What used to be so common and everyone who had a house did it, is probably forgotten today thanks to advertising and consumer society. Advertising taught people to buy bottled water and taught them to throw away and not fix things - what gets fixed doesn't sell, just like what is made at home or what nature gives us - and that just doesn't suit a consumer society.
Every spring, I see neighbors around me who, instead of setting up compost in their garden, prefer to load branches and grass onto a cart, hitch it to their car and drive to the collection yard. The same people then go to large and impersonal hobby markets to buy super-prime-eco-cool wood chips for flower beds and clay packed in plastic bags for strawberries.
It is best to stop at a fast-food restaurant along the way with children, have a drink with a paper straw on a paper tray, and transport them by an electric car charged from a coal-fired power station.
They throw away clean bottles and packaging to buy new food wraps and more boxes for boxes later.
In the evening, they go to bed and have a nice warm feeling that they did something for the planet and saved the turtle...
I'm not an environmental activist, but the path to sustainability is definitely not paper straws, solar cars charged from coal-fired power plants with lithium mined in crazy unecological conditions somewhere in China, Chile, or Argentina, and film production companies that calculate their "carbon footprint" in order to they received subsidies and incentives accordingly.
It's all just in the setting and thinking of people.
You just have to look at state companies and services - what used to be procured by a guy with a broom for a hundred crowns, today is done by the same guy with a leaf blower for fifteen thousand, into which he still pours expensive gasoline, makes noise, emits emissions and in of course, it does nothing to clean up the result, because it just blows everything around.
And this is perfectly fine with people - I haven't seen anyone with a broom for years - it comes across as normal companies and the state, who then proudly put on their website that they are "carbon neutral" and that they "support the environment".
Or the line of "modern cars" - mainly German ones, which turn off the engine after stopping at a crossing. On paper, the deci fuel saved is bought dearly by the engine being destroyed much earlier from the constant starting. And what about the fact that producing a new engine costs about 1000 times more energy than such a car "saves" during its lifetime - but that doesn't matter to anyone - after all, the grams of virtually saved CO2 on paper are important.
What about those cool wind farms? You know that turbine blades are made from materials that cannot be recycled at all, so when they reach the end of their life, they simply buried in the desert?
And I even read somewhere that if all the energy needed to produce such a windmill is calculated, it will never produce this energy during its lifetime - meaning that the oil needed for its production would be cheaper and more environmentally friendly to burn directly.
And then you feel like among people, like among the ultra-eco-vegan women who demonstrated in leather shoes against the killing of animals for meat when I was young.
The main problem is that true sustainability cannot be earned, therefore humanity will never have it, with current thinking.
This is the stupidity and herdsmanship that unfortunately drives this society and it has completely died out with covid and until this mindset of people changes, straws simply will not save the planet.
