It's worth mentioning that Americans (or the industrial revolution) made a ton of formerly high status goods available to everyone. Specifically meat. Those high status goods have absolutely insanely high environmental footprints.
Most people didn't regularly consume red meat before industrialization. However, once we made it "cheap", the everyman could eat steak for dinner every night! Same goes for all kinds of goods, especially plastic.
It's wild how many things changed around the turn of that century, for the worse, but we accept all these things as just the way things are and should be. Like, seriously, widespread use of toilet paper is just over a century old. That's not that long for something most people probably assume has just always been that way.
Sorry if this is a bit off topic. It's just something that boggles my mind; how close we are yet so far away from our past.
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It's worth mentioning that Americans (or the industrial revolution) made a ton of formerly high status goods available to everyone. Specifically meat. Those high status goods have absolutely insanely high environmental footprints.
Most people didn't regularly consume red meat before industrialization. However, once we made it "cheap", the everyman could eat steak for dinner every night! Same goes for all kinds of goods, especially plastic.
It's wild how many things changed around the turn of that century, for the worse, but we accept all these things as just the way things are and should be. Like, seriously, widespread use of toilet paper is just over a century old. That's not that long for something most people probably assume has just always been that way.
Sorry if this is a bit off topic. It's just something that boggles my mind; how close we are yet so far away from our past.