And so it happened. Again. 

Not too long ago I caught up with an old friend who has lived in the Big City for a couple decades and who has adopted city environmentalists as his guides and friends. As is eventually inevitable (usually not so fast, but the experience varies) City Boy started in on the relative ignorance of non-city folk and their heathen environmental ways including what WE need to change to save the planet for the rest of 'us'. As is my incendiary way, I let him go on and on with a few "yeah?"s and a couple of "Hmmm"s, as well as a "Ya don't say"s or two. Eventually I think he realized I wasn't readily agreeing with his long-winded dressing down and he said "Well, don't you have anything to say about it?".

Tada ..... or more accurately, OOPS!

Well city boy, my first question is what are you doing to fix the Environmental Disaster area you've chosen to live in? The concrete, asphalt, smog, litter, grime, slime, that's your world. To steal a phrase, you've killed mother Earth for miles around and you dump all your trash and other Waste on innocent people many more miles away. ALL of your water, ALL of your electricity, ALL of the resources you demand to live on come from somewhere else. From the ignorant country folk you blame for your indiscretions. ALL of your waste, ALL of your smog, MOST of your scorn you heap on the rest of us who are living and working in a living zone, who foster nature rather than utterly destroying it. In short, you attack the innocent. WE are not your problem, your mammoth blind spot is your problem. 

Now I'm not gonna tell you he was converted or stopped to think or even admitted I gave him something to think about. That's not how this works. I used to try the sensitive, less painful approach to this in the many friends and relatives who've gone city and later came back to reproach us heathens for our backward and destructive ways. No approach has yet worked to get even one of 'em to admit they're not in a position to fault the world for things that are far less egregious than those they automatically participate in, actively or passively, as city residents. 

My all time favorite is the water thing. I waste water. Apparently. I run it too much when doing dishes, flush too often, waste too much watering plants and gardens, shower too often (though they can NEVER complain I take too long). My water comes from deep under my feet, not from some reservoir in someone else's back yard. My well did not take land from the legal owners and require whole towns to be flooded. And ALL of the water I use goes back into the ground it came from and will be naturally filtered and available for use. That's when desperation hits and some will gleefully note "Not ALL of it, some of it evaporates and doesn't get back in the ground!". Uh, yeah, and how is that wasteful? Your water goes to an industrial facility where machinery, chemicals, and processes break it down and ....... dump it out somewhere else, likely in a river or ocean where its now unnatural composition is lost to you and dumped on an entire ecosystem. Get your resources from somewhere else, dump your waste somewhere else.  

Every few years this happens, every few years I try to educate someone new, and within days or weeks the lesson fades and disappears. That friend (COVID prompted the re-connection) since May has reverted back to his city ways and posts and rants about Cow Farts and rampant fertilizer, antibiotic, and Roundup usage as well as wasted water for irrigation and all of the fuel burned unnecessarily. And no, he's not vegetarian or vegan so he's complaining about his own food supply and ignoring the very real facts that fertilizer, antibiotics, and roundup  are more expensive when used indiscriminately than a farm could sustain. That cow farts are no more dangerous that the Bison farts from the millions that used to roam the Midwest. That the water used by farmers and ranchers is returned to where it was taken from either directly back into the ground or into the atmosphere to rain down there or somewhere else. Like maybe into the reservoirs that keep city folks alive. 

Short version: If you choose to live in an environmental disaster area don't blame anyone else. Own it!!