• CannonFodder@lemmy.world
    26·
    8 days ago

    No - literally rivers were on fire.
    And gay bashing was mainstream, fully tolerated, very common. Lakes were turning clear like swimming pools due to acid rain - kinda pretty, but totally dead.

    • LillyPip@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      People seem to forget that GenX saw this shit and was like, no more. That’s what led to the current drive to fix this. But GenX doesn’t get credit for starting it – we’re grouped with boomers for some reason.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
        51·
        7 days ago

        Think of that but continuous. Sure there seems to be to be more environmental disasters than ever but each is a one off.

        • Dead lakes and crumbling masonry from acid rain were continuous. For years
        • BP having an oil spill eventually goes away, but rivers were toxic for decades, repeatedly starting on fire
        • LillyPip@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          4 days ago

          The rivers of fire was one major thing that contributed to the formation of the EPA, actually. In the preceding decades, if was totally normal for industry to just dump whatever waste into rivers and nobody cared.

          We still have far too much pollution going on, but I feel many people have forgotten just how egregious it was before government regulations were put in place to stop shit like that.

          It’s pretty bad now, but more to the point, we’re still paying for the wanton destruction wrought decades ago. And now ‘conservatives’ (air quotes because in this case, it’s the opposite) want to roll back regulations because freedom.

          • AA5B@lemmy.world
            2·
            4 days ago

            I’ve been through river cleanups everywhere I ve lived. There’s always something toxic that corps got away with dumping for so many years and then just left it. Government on the hook for so many billions of dollars cleaning up the mess. Where’s that sense of personal/corporate responsibility we hear so much about?

      • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 days ago

        You obviously weren’t around for the 1980s, and that’s OK! But don’t try to shoehorn current events into what we dealt with in the past.