Why we do not live as our grandparents live for the sake of children and grang children?

Question

our grandparents borrowed this planet from us.

by their way of living they inherited it to us in "good condition". we changed the way of living and what are we going to inherite to our grandchildren.

Answer 1

It's because our parents haven't taught us any better George.

Now it's up to us to teach our children better. Are you up to it George?

Answer 2

I certainly don't want to live like my grandparents did.  Most these days can't survive without their starbucks, cell phones and ipods.

No phones or tv, no car, couldn't get a job outside the home, couldn't own my own property, couldn't vote, life expectancy very low, old and worn out from having babies by age 32 and all the other fun things.

Answer 3

What in God's name are you talking about?  Our grandparents only left it in good condition because they didn't have enough time to pollute to the degree we are now.  Since the Industrial Revolution pollution has been terrible what with the smoke and the waste products.  In our grandparents' time it was just dumped any old place.

Now we are better at handling this than they were.  BUT, we now have the accumulated effects PLUS we have a larger amount of industry due to a larger population and booming development in China and India.

Answer 4

Our Grandparents were satisfied with much less . We will not be. We call it progress

Answer 5

our grandparents got the world in the condition which it was left by the previous generation..... and over time we have actuallyimproved the condition which the world is heading, however due to our grandparents not doing whats in the best intrest for us, we are having to cope with those problems now

Answer 6

If we are going to save ourselves from extinction, we need to go back to the time when we were hunter gatherers. Then we would be so busy trying to feed ourselves there would be no time for s*x. Without social security we would'nt want to many children anyway Hence the fall of the world population to around say a billion. The earth , after around a hundred or so years, will begin  to right itself, and the animals will move back to the land we have created by our depopulation and in turn everything else will fall into place. This problem needs a lot of sacrifice, I think it is worth it.

Answer 7

Times change, the way we think, our grandfathers lived in war,

made way for us, now its a pretty fare well place on most parts of the world for us.

Theres this interesting documentary. Its called "Ghost in Your Genes"

breakdown: it seems emotions CAN be stored in genes and theres this 'switch' wich passes the state of mind of your grandfather or grandmother on to you.

Not from generation to generation, but every-other-generation this switch becomes active and passes some life knowledge about your heritage.

Wonder why this switch exists, maybe it supports your theory

in a way that it says that grandparents knowledge should be passed on to granchildren (dont know why, curious to know)

very interesting.......

So if you see alot of Goths and hippies these days, well, yeah, their grandparents used to be ....

Answer 8

Wait a minute. Our grandparents (or at least mine) saw the car come to dominate our culture, they saw the invention of urban sprawl.  They gave us all that first generation of pesticides, the nasty ones like DDT, the nasty cancer ones and the ones that wiped out entire ecosystems.  They cheerily painted their houses with lead paint for years after lead was linked to a bevy of problems.  They used most of the rivers and lakes of the midwest as open sewers dumping PCBS, lead, mercury, and other poisons at will as industry boomed.  They cheerily mined radioactive elements and let the wastes flow into rivers.

     Admittedly, they eventually did realize the harm they were doing and started changing the way things were done.  They improved a lot of things about the world, but I find it hard to pretend they were all John Muir.

Answer 9

My mom always said each generation gets wiser & weaker.

The more we learn, the more we realize some things are better left unchanged. We can get tomatoes all year long but often they've lost most of their nutrients.

If we all went back to bicycles, walking and/or horses how would that effect the economy?

In my grandmother's day most of appalachia didn't have clean running water. There were diseases that killed young children that are either non-existent now or no worse than the flu. During WW I more died from the flu at home than in the war. Homes burned down from candles. You froze in bad weather & sweltered in the warm. Pigs were fed slop from the table & animals used creeks to wash & defecate in. We don't have to work as long & hard to barely put food on the table. Predjudice brings shame to the bigot instead of agreement. Are these the better conditions you mentioned?

For everything man gains he has to lose something. But the good old days aren't as good as we seem to think. We are more comfortable. But we also waste too much. There should be a happy medium but too few will give up creature comforts unless forced to.

Each generation has made it worse for the next overall but they've also made it better. We learn to adapt & then the next generation will find ways to adapt better to what they've been left. No era was perfect. Nor will one ever be this side of heaven. The same generation causing our current problems is the same one that started the save the earth campaign over 30 yrs. ago. So something had to be wrong even then. But I wonder how much effort they're still making instead of just passing the banner & living better like their parents before them.

Answer 10

You are apparently unaware of the fact that there has not been a particularly "green" generation, period. Humankind drastically changes its environment. From the moment man discovered that he could make an amazing bison steak over the old fire pit he has been adding carbon dioxide to the environment. Every major waterway that has been developed by civilizations dating back to the beginning of civilization has been flooded with our pollution. We drained straight sewage into our waterways as well as our waste water from manufacturing. Long before the truly horrible pollution of the Industrial revolution, back in Elizabethan times leather tanneries had to be several mile downstream of major communities because of the damage they did to the waterways they dumped into.

These actions extend beyond the old world too. Even the image many have of the Native American as a "Noble Savage" living off of the land without changing it is predicated on false information and ecological propaganda. There is evidence to suggest that their use of Swidden agriculture had cleared large tracts of forest on the east coast by the time European settlers arrived. Many of these forests only grew back after native populations declined (*cough* genocide), and then were cut right back again by the settlers once there were enough of them to do damage.

I guess the point I would make is that humans have always done damage to their environment, and until more recently it just hasn't caught up with us because for one, the population of an area effects how quickly the changes will occur. The more humans you stick in one place, the more damage. The world population is staggeringly higher than at any other time in history, and that is one reason we have seen an increase in  problems, not because we do things worse than our grandparent's generation. h**l, if anything we're more careful. Our grandparent's generation didn't worry nearly as much about things like lead paint, recycling, carbon emissions, the poor whales, (everything listed in the post above me by xxmachinas) etc.etc. etc.

Of course, I'm not arguing we don't need to worry about the planet, just not saying that it is a new problem. We've been making it our entire existence.

Answer 11

Did you somehow forget the way our grandparents lived? The condition of the Earth may have been good, but that's only because all the pollution and environmental damage done from the Industrial Revolution onwards hadn't completely caught up to us yet. That...and there was little study of environmental impact of modern human activity before the late 1960s.

Cancer rates, especially lung cancer, began rising in the EARLY 20th Century. Our grandparents weren't any better at handling this planet than we are. The only thing they had on their side was ignorance.